Strawcolored Flatsedge Cyperus strigosus
Strawcolored Flatsedge is a perennial grass native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 3.2 ft and blooms Jul in part shade – shade, with red fruit.
More about this plant
Cyperus strigosus is a species of sedge known by the common names false nutsedge and straw-colored flatsedge. It is native to the United States, Cuba and Canada, where it grows in wet areas in many habitat types, including disturbed and cultivated areas such as roadsides and crop fields. It is common and sometimes weedy. It is a perennial sedge growing up to 70 cm (28 in) tall. The inflorescence is a cluster of many linear-shaped spikelets up to 3 cm (1.2 in) long each. A few long, leaf-like bracts grow at the base of the spike. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 6.4–7
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Height
- 3.2 ft
- Spacing
- 3–4 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Slow
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Bunch
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Red persists into winter
- Flower colour
- Brown AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Sprigs
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~5 caterpillar species
Cyperus supports ~5 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 modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Cyperus in North America, including:
+ 4 more species → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird
Open records of who else uses Strawcolored Flatsedge — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
Related plants
More Cyperus →
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 (33) 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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