#graminoid

The red bits dangling from filaments are anthers, which are the pollen-bearing parts of flowers. Grasses are wind-pollinated and don’t need to attract animal pollinators with showy petals, so grass flowers are a lot less conspicuous than how we normally picture flowers to look. The other features of a flower are still present, with the exposed anthers being perhaps the most visible.

To learn more about the anatomy of grasses and their flowers, watch the video below:

When I first heard the name “inland sea oats,” I wondered if it was an oat that grew near an inland sea or if it was some variant of a sea oat that grew inland. Short answer: it’s the latter. Sort of. Then it gets complicated. For starters, there are more names. This plant must’ve hit the jackpot in the common name lottery, because, in addition to inland sea oats and inland wood oats, it’s also called river oats, wood oats (without the “inland”), Indian wood oats, upland oats, wild oats, northern sea oats, plus regional variations, and endless permutations of all these.

This is a shade-tolerant plant native to the southeastern U.S., as shown by the green-tinted areas in the USDA map below. It is found along riverbanks, on floodplains, and in bottomland forests, giving rise to the names “river oats” and “wood oats.”

Its seedheads resemble those of sea oats (Uniola paniculata), which grows on coastal sands. However, since this species is not a coastal plant, the combination of its similar appearance but dissimilar habitat get mashed together into the awkward name “inland sea oats.” As both of these plants were once classified under the same genus (Uniola), it’s not clear to me if they’re as genetically distinct as the separate genera would suggest. So the slightly longer answer to my original question is: it’s a maybe, maybe-not sea oat that grows inland.

However, neither plant has ever been associated with Avena, which is the genus to which our breakfast oats belong. I thnk using the name “wild oats” on this plant is just going to cause confusion, because the farmed oat (Avena sativa) has a wild relative (Avena fatua), and its common name is — wait for it — wild oat.

It should be clear by now that common names can be unreliable, but perhaps the most nonsensical one here is “northern sea oats,” because this species is not native to the north, not a seaside plant, and not an oat. How anyone came up with that name is a complete mystery to me.