Common Reed

Overview

The common reed is one of the most widely distributed flowering plants on earth, colonising the margins of lakes, rivers, marshes, and tidal flats across every continent except Antarctica. It is the great threshold plant — rooted in water and mud, reaching toward light, forming the impenetrable walls of the reedbed that separate the open water from the dry land. Reeds have been cut for thatching since the Neolithic; for writing styluses in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia; for pan pipes, flutes, and reed instruments across every culture that knew them. The classical pipes of Pan — syrinx — are reed pipes, and the myth of Syrinx (the nymph transformed into reeds to escape the god's pursuit) is one of the oldest stories of the liminal, the between-place, the creature that becomes neither one thing nor another.

Botanical Notes

A robust perennial grass, 1–4 metres tall, spreading by rhizomes and stolons to form extensive clonal stands. Stems round, hollow, with flat, pointed, bluish-green leaves up to 60cm long. Feathery purple-brown flower panicles, 20–50cm, appearing from July to September, persisting through winter as pale, silky plumes. Found at the margins of fresh and brackish water throughout the world. Rhizomes may extend several metres and penetrate to considerable depth. One of the fastest-growing plants in temperate regions. Old stems persist and provide nesting habitat for bittern, bearded tit, and other reedbed species. Phragmites australis is nearly cosmopolitan — some authorities recognise multiple subspecies; the European native has thinner, more flexible culms than some invasive North American populations.

Lore & History

The Egyptian hieroglyph for the sound 'i' is a reed — the simplest, most common sound, and the simplest, most common plant of the Nile margins. In Mesopotamia, reed was the material of the first styluses, the first writing implements, and the word for reed and the word for writing share etymology in several ancient languages. The Sufi poet Rumi opens the Masnavi with the image of the reed flute — the ney — crying because it has been cut from the reedbed, severed from its origin, longing for return. It is one of the great images of spiritual longing in world literature, and it is the common reed. In British folk practice, reeds and rushes were strewn on floors at festivals, woven into crosses on St. Brigid's Day, and used in rush-bearing ceremonies that persisted in Westmorland and Lancashire into the nineteenth century.

Warnings