Mead’s Sedge (Carex meadii Dewey)

Between March and September 2020, I walked every morning in the prairie and woods of the Cowling Arboretum. When I started, the leaves of hepatica were just unfurling from the ground at my feet. On April 1 the first flowers appeared. First hepatica, then Dutchman’s breeches, trout lily, and rue anemone. In the prairie, the pasqueflowers appeared on April 5, then nothing but brown for a month until the prairie smoke bloomed in early May. Every morning I walked though the woods and out onto the prairie, out around Kettle Hole Marsh where in late March the chorusing frogs found their voices, then back through the empty campus. I kept track of the date on which each new flower began to bloom. Beginning around the 20th of April there was something new almost every day until the beginning of August.

I grew up among the remnants of the eastern deciduous forest, and from my mother I had learned to identify trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, and Dutchmen’s breeches. I knew the woodland flowers by heart. But in June, when the action moved from the woods to the prairie, I began to put names to plants I had never known before. I downloaded the iNaturalist app on my phone and took a picture of every unfamiliar plant I saw. I began to memorize the prairie as I had memorized the woods.

I still have a long way to go. I’ve begun to distinguish between the four species of aster in the local prairie, and the six species of goldenrod. But the species of sedge are still largely a mystery to me. 16 species have been identified in the Arboretum where I took my walks, and there are likely to be more: the genus Carex includes roughly 600 separate North American species. My list for 2020 includes just one, Mead’s sedge (carex meadii), which I identifed on May 24.

Mead’s sedge is named for Samuel Barnum Mead (1799-1880), a physician who in 1833 settled in Augusta, Illinois. The year before Dr. Mead arrived in Illinois, the poet William Cullen Bryant had visited the state, and had found inspiration in the prairies, “boundless and beautiful,” “with flowers whose glory and whose multitude rival the constellations.” Surveying the prairies that covered most of Hancock County, Illinois, Dr. Mead immediately set to work cataloguing the plants he found there, including the two species that bear his name, Mead’s Sedge (carex meadii) and Mead’s Milkweed (asclepias meadii). In 1846, Dr. Mead published in The Prairie Farmer a 12-page “Catalogue of plants growing spontaneously in the state of Illinois, the principal part near Augusta, Hancock County.” The list includes 12 species of goldenrod and 42 species of sedge.



Dr. Samuel Barnum Mead


The herbarium at Brown University includes a specimen of Mead’s sedge collected by Dr. Mead near Augusta. Through Dr. Mead’s frequent correspondence with other botanists, the specimen found its way to the physician and botanist Henry Parker Sartwell (1792-1867), who included it in his Carices Americae Septentrionalis exsiccatae. The two-volume work, published in 1848 and 1850, was a collection of actual dried plants in the genus Carex, accompanied by printed labels, available to subscribers who wanted to add examples of the species to their collections. One of the subscribers to Sartwell’s volume was Rhode Island wool merchant and amateur botanist Stephen Thayer Olney (1812-1878), who later bequeathed his collection to Brown.

On the sheet from the Brown herbarium, there are two small plants that Mead carefully removed from the prairie to preserve as much of the root structure as possible. The roots are dark gray, the faded color of Illinois soil. A cluster of grass-like leaves rises above the roots, ranging in color from raw umber to straw to gray with a hint of green. Two thin gray-green stalks extend above the leaves, terminating in the seed heads, like underdeveloped heads of wheat. After removing them from the soil, Mead would have laid the specimens between sheets of paper and placed them in a plant press to dry before mounting them, labeling them, and sending them to their destination.

In the nineteenth century, thousands of plant specimens were dispersed throughout the country through a network of amateur and professional botanists. In May 1844, Dr. Mead wrote to the botanist John Torrey: “I have been exceedingly busy in collecting plants for 2 yrs., in order to obtain by exchange one specimen of all N. American plants. I have collected & distributed about ten thousand specimens within 2 years & I have already collected a thousand or more this spring.” Many of the correspondents with whom Mead exchanged plant specimens were also physicians, who were drawn to botany during their medical training, which included the study of medical botany, the identification of plants with pharmacological uses. Dr. Mead sent specimens to Dr. P.D. Knieskern in New Jersey, whose botanical collection was later acquired by Rutgers, to Dr. George Engelmann in St. Louis, whose collection went to the Missouri Botanical Garden, to Dr. Joseph Barratt in Connecticut, whose collection went to Wellesley College, and to Dr. Charles Wilkins Short in Louisville, Kentucky, whose collection of more than 15,000 specimens went to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences.

“I have received some 800 species from Dr. Engelmann & he has promised more as he is in my debt,” Dr. Mead wrote in a letter to John Torrey in July 1844. “I have sent Dr. Short already about two thousand specimens.”

Samuel Barnum Mead died at the age of 81 after falling out of an apple tree. At his death, Dr. Mead’s personal herbarium included more than 10,000 specimens, including every species growing in Hancock County, and nearly every species in the state of Illinois. Specimens that he collected and exchanged with other botanists are included in herbaria throughout the United States, including 140 in the collection of the New York Botanical Garden.

Meanwhile, the prairie itself was disappearing under the plow. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, 99% of the original tallgrass prairie has disappeared. In Hancock County, Illinois, the original prairie that Mead explored is long gone. The restored Minnesota prairie I pass through on my walks contains only a small fraction of the species present in the original prairie. But some of those plants from the original prairie still exist, mounted on sheets of paper.



A specimen of Mead's Sedge (Carex meadii) in the Brown University Herbarium. The specimen was collected by Samuel Barnum Mead and sent to H.P. Sartwell (ca. 1845).