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Best Place to Sucker A Sedge
Shaw Nature Reserve
By Stefene Russell
Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

You don’t hear kids boasting that they’re going to be horticulturists when they grow up. That’s because they don’t know the word—and they don’t realize that on warm days in December, as sullen office workers stare at the tweed on their cubicle walls, the horticulturists are outside, speaking Latin.

“Hystricina … hystricina … hystricina …” Cindy Gilberg peers at the markers in Shaw Nature Reserve’s experimental sedge garden, looking for what you or I would call porcupine sedge. A misty rain is falling, but it’s warm enough to go coatless—warm enough to have awakened the spring peepers, little frogs that normally come out of hibernation when early-spring bulbs are sending forth blooms.

Gilberg and fellow horticulturist Terri Brandt hunt down their specimens, gingerly slicing into the wet earth with flat spades to cut out four or five clumps of each plant. They’ll return to the “headhouse” (where seeds are cleaned, sorted, stored and documented) to wash the roots, separate the crowns and gather the seeds for the reserve’s annual native plant sale in May, the busiest time of the year. There’s plenty to do in every season: seed collection in the fall, for instance. This year, they were not able to gather all the seeds they needed, which is why they are spending the morning digging up samples of “aggressive suckering sedges,” used in erosion control. Damp paper in hand, they check off their list: Carex lanuginosa (woolly sedge), Carex buxbaumii (bog sedge), Carex emoryi (Emory’s sedge), Carex lupulina (hop sedge).

“‘Sedges have edges.’ That’s what you learn in botany. See how the stems are triangular? That’s one of the main ways to tell the difference between a grass and a sedge,” Brandt says, twirling a sprig between her fingers.

In the ’20s, when its most delicate plants began to die as a result of exposure to coal smoke, the Missouri Botanical Garden purchased this 2,500-acre parcel in Gray Summit to house them. The pollution abated, and now MoBot uses the acreage for research and educational outreach (though some of the orchids live here, too). It’s now a green island surrounded by sprawl, but once you’re inside the gates it’s easy to forget how proximate you are to subdivisions, gas stations and fast-food joints.

As Brandt and Gilberg dig, a botanist wanders over to chew the fat. He complains that rabbits are eating his prairie violets before he can collect the seeds, asks whether one of the women can cat-sit for him while he’s on vacation. Then he spies it, hardly an inch out of the ground: a honeysuckle sprout, right by the heel of Gilberg’s shoe. She rips the interloper from the ground and hangs it, dirt clods and all, on the chain-link fence.

“Like coyotes,” she says, chuckling, “when you hang the skin on the fence, to tell them to keep out.”

Once all the Carex specimens have been loaded on the truck, the two women return to the headhouse by way of a quick dodge down a paved public road on the edge of the preserve. Later, chitchatting as they take a shortcut through the wildflower garden, the topic returns—as it almost always does—to green, growing things. Rather than talk TV, they talk about their gardens.

“I have some kind of Dracaena—it’s not marginata, but it’s some kind of Dracaena—it’s about this big, and it’s got flowers on it!” Brandt marvels. “It’s starting to bloom.”

“Is it pot-bound?” Gilberg asks. “That’s when they bloom. They’re, like, ‘Omigod, it’s a little tight in here—I’d better spread some seed before I die!’”

And that’s the vocational acid test—interest in what you’re paid to do when you’re not being paid to do it. At the end of the day, a horticulturist still wants to go home and grow stuff.