A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words 1467 entries

bog cotton

BOG KOT-un
Eriophorum, the cottongrasses — sedges of acid peatland that go unnoticed all spring and then, in early summer, put up heads of pure white bristles that catch every movement of air. A blanket bog in flower reads from a distance as a field of small lights. It is a reliable indicator of wet ground.
Etymology
Plain English for what it looks like, and it is neither bog cotton nor grass. The white is not fiber for seed dispersal in the cotton sense but greatly elongated perianth bristles — the remains of the flower, drawn out into hairs. The Latin agrees with the English: Eriophorum is Greek erion, wool, plus -phoros, bearing. Wool-bearer. Irish has ceannbhán, white-head, which describes the same plant from a little further off.
Notes
The heads were used as tinder, lamp wicks, and pillow stuffing, and the fiber is too short and too brittle to spin on its own. Cottongrass is the food plant of several moths that live nowhere else, and its old seed heads persist into winter as pale wisps on brown ground.
flora grassland Greek water
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