Question

Which plant is described by these clues? The genus name comes from a South American Spanish word meaning cutter, earned by leaf margins that slice unprotected skin on contact. The species epithet honours a naturalist born in Potsdam in 1789 who spent his short career collecting plants across Brazil and the southern cone. Each minute flower has no petals at all: it sits between two chaffy scales, and small stacks of them are carried above a pair of empty {bracts}. Where each blade meets its {sheath} there is a dense fringe of fine hairs about an eighth of an inch (3 to 5 mm) long in place of the thin papery flap most of its relatives carry. Plants are not all alike: some bear only female flowers while others carry bisexual ones, and the female plumes look fuller because silky hairs up to a third of an inch (4 to 8 mm) long clothe each developing seed. Stiff blue-green blades 2 to 6.5 feet (60 to 200 cm) long arch out of a dense tussock, each showing one prominent {midrib} and no secondary veins between it and the cutting margin. At the base of an old clump the dead leaf bases curl into tight spirals like wood shavings. Its home ground is the open temperate plains and river margins of Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil. A single female plume can loose up to 100,000 wind-borne seeds, which is how garden plants came to colonise coastal bluffs and roadsides in California, Hawaii and New Zealand. Florists sell its dried feathery cream plumes by the bunch, the fixture of 1970s living rooms that has returned as a boho wedding staple.

Accepted Answer

Cortaderia selloana 'Pumila'

Name That Plant #085