Common Spikerush Eleocharis palustris
Common Spikerush is a perennial grass native to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. It grows to 1.3 ft and blooms May in part shade – shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Eleocharis palustris, the common spike-rush, creeping spike-rush or marsh spike-rush, is a species of mat-forming perennial flowering plants in the sedge family Cyperaceae. It grows in wetlands in Europe, North Africa, northern and central Asia and North America. Eleocharis palustris is not easily distinguished from other closely related species and is extremely variable worldwide itself. The species epithet palustris is Latin for "of the marsh" and indicates its common habitat. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 4–8
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Height
- 1.3 ft
- Spacing
- 1.5–2 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Moderate
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Rhizomatous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Brown
- Flower colour
- Brown AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Sprigs
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Autumn – Summer 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 Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Eleocharis in North America, including:
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Common Spikerush :
Wildlife & visitors 60 birds · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Common Spikerush — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 60 birds species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 43 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Common Spikerush, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Eleocharis →
How we know this (5) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
We place each species on Grime’s competitor–stress-tolerator–ruderal (C–S–R) triangle using the globally-calibrated “StrateFy” method: leaf size drives the competitor score, dense low-area leaves the stress-tolerator score, and thin high-area leaves the ruderal score. The result is a C/S/R percentage mix and one of 19 strategy classes; we show it in plain words and keep the percentages for the curious.
Honest limits: A species-mean strategy from pooled global leaf measurements — a broad ecological signal, not a precise per-plant or per-site value. Derived, never a measured fact.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
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 (38) 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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