I’m 171 cm tall, for size reference: so that’s well over 3 metres of water reed! What’s more amazing is that in better conditions, these reeds can grow to twice that height.
A reed bed: behind is an out-of-focus is a heron eating a rodent, sheltered from my prying lens.
They spread rhizomatically, with a clonal patch being able to persist for over 1000 years.
Phragmites have some unique ecological properties that make them a keystone species in Eurasian marsh biomes:
- they purify water by hyperaccumulating pollutants,
- they are halotolerant, meaning they can tolerate saline water (hence their growth in the local brackish area),
- and, they exhude allelopathic compounds that inhibit the growth of algae.
Here in Eurasia at least, the only habitats to which they are disruptive are those that have been traditionally grazed, but are no longer: they are one of many plants that can be effectively suppressed through conservation grazing.
These grasses have traditionally been used here in Scandinavia for making thatch roofs; however, their use is giving way to farmed Japanese Miscanthus species, but either kind of grass will make a roof that lasts several decades. [x]
In essence, they are valuable plants that have fallen out of vogue in favour of machine-harvestable crops, but they have both historical and potential uses in sustainable building, locavore eating, and conserving habitat.