Pantagraph.com | News | Sedge specials says, "Botany can be a tool to turn people on to the environment."

NewsMonday, September 3, 2007 11:32 PM CDT

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Sedge specials says, "Botany can be a tool to turn people on to the environment."

By Clare Howard
(Peoria) Journal Star

MOSSVILLE -- Mike Murphy reads sedges like paragraphs in a book, interpreting the history of a landscape. A botanist with the Illinois Natural History Survey, Murphy is a sedge specialist because he’s impatient. If he had more patience, he might be a moss man. Moss specialists collect specimens in the field and then return to the lab to positively identify under a microscope what they just saw out in nature.

Instead, Murphy, 33, has spent hours learning the precise language of the 160 to 170 sedges in Illinois. He can read a landscape and interpret its past: high quality undisturbed, high quality restored, disturbed and destroyed. Each clue directs him to additional levels of observation and analysis.

Sedges are interpreters, trail guides and historians.

One summer morning, Murphy and Mike Miller, chief naturalist at Forest Park Nature Center, led members of the Peoria Academy of Sciences Botany Section on a sedge hike through Camp Wokanda north of Mossville.

Sedges, Murphy told the group, are an important component of our natural resources, and we’re losing some before most people even know they exist.

He explained that sedges are the third-largest plant family in Illinois, following sunflowers and grasses. Sedges look like grasses but are a distinct genus, with a triangular patterned stem, three-ranked leaves and fruit sacks.

It was 1999 when Murphy first started studying the sedge genus Carex.

“I’d collect and study and pull my hair out. I struggled to find something to make this understandable,” he said.

Miller said, “Sedges are the poster child for undiscovered and underappreciated. People notice flowers and grasses. But once you start to notice sedges, you start to see them all over.”

These unobtrusive plants are hosts to a number of insects that can’t live without them. Find the host plants, and puzzles of the habitat start fitting together. Sedges are a vital component of landscape diversity. They were an important fuel for carrying prairie fires across the landscape. Without fire, diversity is minimized and soil erosion increases.

Murphy was an outdoor educator in Rockford before he returned to graduate school for a master’s degree in botany. He works out of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, Illinois Natural History Survey offices in Champaign.

“Botany can be a tool to turn people on to the environment. Study botany and you develop a whole arsenal of reasons not to maintain an artificial concept of poison in the natural world,” he said. “You learn it is not logical to use chemicals on a lawn that requires more water than an entire village in the Third World.”

The group progressed slowly through Wokanda. Murphy frequently fell to his knees to closely examine the hairiness or hairlessness of sedges in order to identify them.

“Ah, a neat one ... Carex citrifolia, the hairiest in Illinois!” he said from an eye-level position with a 6-inch sedge. “Carex blanda is one of the most common in the state. It tells you little about a woodland. If you see Carex gracilescens, then take a second look because you’d be in an area of real quality.

Camp Wokanda is about 300 acres of river bluff woodland that was once owned by the Boy Scouts. Peoria Park District began working on woodland restoration in 1992 and acquired the property in 1996.

Miller said it’s clear even to occasional hikers and members of the public that the restoration work at Wokanda has infused the woods with life and biodiversity.

“These acres tell us this is what well-cared-for woodlands can still be like,” he said.