Plant Family
Typhaceae
Cattail family — the plant is harmless; it is the water it grew in that needs checking.
Rhizomatous marsh monocots of nearly worldwide distribution, used as food, tinder, wound dressing and haemostatic — and used industrially because they concentrate metals out of the water they stand in.
4 Notable Members
Overview
The Cattail / Bulrush Family
Tall rhizomatous perennials of standing fresh water, found on every continent except Antarctica, with the familiar brown cylindrical flower spike — densely packed female flowers below, a narrow male spike above that sheds enormous quantities of pollen and then withers. A small family, but an unusually useful one.
Shared Traits
How to Recognise It
In Practice
Medical Significance
Three distinct uses run through this family, and they belong to different plant parts and different species. Keeping them apart is most of what a reader needs.
The fruit fluff is a wound and burn dressing — used across North America for at least four thousand years, with archaeological evidence to that effect. This is the family’s best tradition-to-mechanism match: water-soluble polysaccharides from that same fruiting head have been shown to act on skin repair in two distinct ways, one fraction driving keratinocyte proliferation and another early differentiation through Smad3 and PKC-α signalling. Tradition, plant part and mechanism all line up, which is rare.
The pollen is a haemostatic — Pu Huang, one of the classical bleeding remedies of Chinese medicine, used raw to move blood stasis and carbonised to stop bleeding. This is a real and well-documented use, but it belongs to Typha angustifolia and T. orientalis, and it is the pollen, not the rhizome or the fluff. It should not be attributed to T. latifolia, for which no haemostatic study exists.
The rhizome is food — starch-rich, harvested through winter, and a staple across the northern hemisphere. It is also the tissue in which most of the family’s antidiabetic and antioxidant pharmacology has been done.
Phytochemistry
Characteristic Chemistry
- Polysaccharides — water-soluble fractions from the fruit and pollen carry the wound-healing and immune activity; this is a family whose actives are polymers rather than small molecules.
- Flavonoid glycosides — typhaneoside and isorhamnetin-3-O-neohesperidoside, the markers of Pu Huang pollen.
- Starch — the rhizome storage carbohydrate that makes the plant a food.
- Phenolic acids and tannins — modest, and responsible for most reported antioxidant activity.
Beyond the Database
Also in This Family
Notable members without a monograph yet.
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