Audubon® Native Yellow Fruited Sedge

Wetland areas can easily be taken over by invasive, exotic plants that crowd out valuable natives and deprive wildlife of better habitat. That's why it’s important, therefore, to establish beneficial natives in these areas to keep nasty exotics at bay. Enter Yellow Fruited Sedge! This dependable native Fringe is an excellent addition to pondside plantings, ecological restoration efforts, bioswales, rain gardens, wet meadows, and even just soggy backyards. Yellow Fruited Sedge’s small seeds are a favorite of waterfowl like Wood Ducks, Mallards, Coots, Sandpipers, Snipes, and Woodcocks. Songbirds like Sparrows and Juncos may also feed on the mustard-colored seeds.

Low, grass-like, green, and generally without showy flowers, native Sedges go unnoticed by most people. However, these humble plants provide big benefits to wildlife (particularly in wetland habitats), and we should include them more in our gardens. The seeds nourish many birds, and the foliage feeds moths and butterflies, such as the tufted Sedge moth, the Virginia ctenucha moth, the eyed brown butterfly, the Appalachian brown, and several skipper butterflies. Yellow Fruited Sedge is native to much of eastern North America. It grows from eastern Canada to Oklahoma and all states eastward except Florida. It’s most often found in wet soil, and will perform best in your garden if consistent moisture can be supplied.

Yellow Fruited Sedge provides birds with not only seeds to eat, but insect protein as well. Songbirds may feed on the caterpillars they find there, as well as a variety of beetles, bugs, flies, aphids, and leafhoppers.