Typha latifolia

Detailed description

Erect shoots 0.15-0.3 m; flowering shoots 10-20 mm thick in middle, stems 3-7 mm thick near inflorescence. Leaves: usually glaucous when fresh; sheath sides papery or membranous, margins narrowly clear, summit tapered into blade to distinctly shouldered, or rarely with firm, papery auricles; mucilage glands at sheath-blade transition usually colorless, obscure, absent from sheath center and blade; widest blades on shoot 10-23(-29) mm wide when fresh, 5-20 mm when dry, distal blades about equaling inflorescence. Inflorescences: staminate spikes contiguous with pistillate or in some clones separated by to 40(-80) mm of naked axis, about as long as pistillate, c.10-20 cmm thick at anthesis; staminate scales colorless to straw-colored, filiform, simple, c.4.0 x 0.05 mm; pistillate spikes in flower pale green drying brownish, later blackish brown or reddish brown, in fruit often mottled with whitish patches of pistil-hair tips, 50-250 x 5-8 mm in flower, 24-36 mm thick in fruit; compound pedicels in fruit bristle-like, variable in same spike, 1.5-3.5 mm; pistillate bracteoles absent. Staminate flowers 5-12 mm; anthers 1-3 mm, thecae yellow, apex dark brown; pollen in tetrads. Pistillate flowers 2-3 mm in flower, 10-15 mm in fruit; pistil-hair tips colorless, whitish in mass, not enlarged; stigmas persistent, forming solid layer on spike surface, pale green in flower, drying brownish, then reddish brown or usually distally blackish, spathulate, ovate to ovate-lanceolate, 0.6-1.0 x 0.2-0.25 mm; carpodia exceeded by and hidden among pistil hairs, straw-colored, apex rounded. Seeds numerous. 2n = 30.