Written by Jake Ingram
Dovetailing with Jim Draper’s Feast of Flowers exhibit, The Museum is featuring a few groupings of North Florida Native Plants in various locations around the museum. Each week we will look at one of these plants in more detail.
Outside the Stein Gallery, staged around the Pines and beneath the Cypress is a large grouping of Soft Rush (Juncus effusus). This fresh water-loving perennial has narrow, upright cylindrical leaves up to two feet tall that mysteriously bear flowers mid-way up their leaves in early summer. Often found growing in road-side ditches and along the margins of lakes, Soft Rush will provide a strong vertical accent in any wetland landscape. Soft Rush is a close fresh water relative to the Black Needlerush (Juncus roemerianus) common in Florida’s vast salt marshes.