In spring, when their heads split open, the air is filled with seeds; and in early summer, its flower looks like a cat's tail, hence its American name, cattail.
After a while, around a turn, I came upon a tidy wood sign painted with Baehrel's name and a logo of acorns, pine needles, and cattail spikes arranged around a sumac bob.
Cattail roots, roasted until caramelised, have a pleasant chestnut flavour.
Familiar flowering plants relying on wind pollination are grasses, rushes, sedges, cattail, sorrel, lamb's-quarters, hemp, nettle, plantain, alder, hazel, birch, poplar, and oak.
Various reeds and the narrow-leaved cattail are abundant, and the giant mardi reed, which reaches a height of up to 25 feet (8 metres), has been used as a versatile construction material since antiquity.
For breakfast, we had watercress, cattail sprouts, chicory greens, burdock roots, persimmons, and water-mint tea.
With hundreds of miles of sandstone and granite cliffs, cattail-lined riverbanks, former factory towns, orchards, farmland and forests, the scale of its geography and the scope of its history are daunting.
After lunch, we left Avalon behind, and the trail moved inland, separating itself from the road to meander through fields, along the cattail-lined edges of reservoirs and up and down the folds of eroded green hills.
"Then you start running after it," said Mr. Alys, who, at a cattail-skinny 6 feet 4 inches, seems built for slicing through air.
This to-ing and fro-ing, which feels pretty sad and pretty real, lends a bit of emotional color to this cattail-slight drama, directed with typical finesse by Daniel Sullivan.
About a quarter-mile inland from the cattail-covered shore of Lake Huron, squared in by trees and reachable only by rutted gravel road, lies one of the latest beachheads in the escalating battle between environmentalists and energy hunters.
