By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on December 23, 2005
Tall-grass prairies and marshes probably are two things that rarely come to mind when you think about the natural wonders of the Texas Hill Country. That’s because these habitats are not common in the Hill Country. However, both of those ecosystems exist on the southeastern side of Boerne. What’s more, they are readily accessible to the public because they are on the property of Cibolo Nature Center (CNC).
The habitat that fascinates me more is the marsh, probably because it seems the most foreign to the Hill Country. We became familiar with extensive coastal marshes when we lived in New Orleans, but when we moved back to Central Texas, we didn’t expect to see a little marsh on the edge of Boerne. The Boerne marsh, unfortunately, even has nutria, the South American rodent that is the scourge of Louisiana marshes.
Marshes are wetlands dominated by sedges, reeds, and grasses (wetlands dominated by trees and bushes are swamps). The CNC marsh has a variety of sedges as well as some reeds and grasses.
All of those plants are “grassy,” making identification a little difficult for many of us. Lottie Millsaps knows a little non-metered rhyme that helps get started on identification:
Sedges have edges
Reeds are round.
Grasses have leaves all the way to the ground.
My favorite sedge in the CNC marsh is the white-top sedge (Rhynchospora colorata). It is a “grassy” plant 1 – 1.5 feet high with three-edged stems and thin elongate leaves. What makes this sedge conspicuous are its three to seven leaf-like bracts that surround the cluster of tiny white flowers at the end of a stem. Each bract is white in the basal portion and dark green in the tip portion, and together the bracts give the appearance of a star-shaped flower. During summer months, the thick clumps of this sedge with white star “flowers” make a striking display.
The conspicuous grass in this marsh is bushy bluestem (Andropogon glomeratus), the two- or three-feet-tall bunch grass with copper-colored inflorescences. On sunny days in late fall, hardly anything is prettier than the fluffy golden-rusty-brown blooms of bushy bluestem along the periphery of this marsh.
It is not all sedges, reeds, and grasses in the CNC marsh. During certain times of year there are colorful wildflowers, including cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis), water-primrose (Ludwigia octovalvis), and tall goldenrod (Solidago altissima).
The CNC marsh is a mere remnant of a Boerne wetland that used to extend over most of the area now covered by the Kendall County Fair Grounds, the sports fields, and a stretch of Highway 46. This ecosystem was saved from complete obliteration when Carolyn and Brent Evans and their friends started to develop the Cibolo Wilderness Trail 16 years ago.
What is now the marsh at CNC was an unofficial garbage dump. After tons of trash were hauled away and drainage from Herff Spring was protected, Nature could return the site to a marsh. The pioneers of the CNC constructed a board walk across that marsh so that now we all can enjoy this special ecosystem.
We owe those early volunteers of the Cibolo Wilderness Trail a debt of gratitude for preserving this habitat and for providing local citizens access to an environment not commonly seen in the Hill Country. This locality is not only home to the assemblage of native plants characteristic of an inland marsh, it is an attraction for birds and insects probably not seen elsewhere in Kendall County.
For example, some species of dragonflies and damselflies recorded for Kendall County were found only at the CNC marsh. Marsh birds, such as rails and certain wrens, also have been spotted only in the CNC marsh. This locality is important to migrating marsh birds which depend on marshy way stations during their long migrations to and from North America.
I think this marsh exists on the eastern edge of Boerne because this area is underlain by a clayey unit of the lower Glen Rose Formation. The clayey layer provides an impediment to vertical flow of groundwater and promotes discharge of groundwater from overlying layers, thus creating the Herff Springs. That situation has created a special marsh habitat for the Boerne area, and it needs special protection.
The remnant of marsh at CNC is now in a delicately balanced environment that could easily be damaged by indiscriminate alteration of the surrounding land. Wouldn’t it be a shame to lose the remaining bit of the Boerne wetland?
