Smallwing Sedge Carex microptera
Smallwing Sedge is a perennial grass native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 2 ft and blooms May in part shade – shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Carex microptera is a species of sedge known by the common name smallwing sedge. It is native to western North America, including most all of western Canada and the western United States. It occurs in moist mountain habitat such as meadows and riverbanks. This sedge produces dense clumps of erect stems over 20 centimeters tall and up to about a meter in height. The inflorescence is a dense cluster of green or brown spikes packed tightly and indistinct from each other. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.6–7.4
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Height
- 2 ft
- Spacing
- 3–5 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Bunch
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Brown
- Flower colour
- Brown AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root, Sprigs
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~36 caterpillar species
Carex supports ~36 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a strong genus.
Recorded feeding on Carex in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
Across 105 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Smallwing Sedge, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Carex →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (32) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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