![]() ![]() The leafstalks holding the rosette to the stem were made up of a spongy tissue that enabled the rosette to float to the surface of the water. From a point on the stem, a circular group of leaves, called a rosette, grew outward. In the shallow water, a stem grew from the single seed each fruit contained. He or she tossed a handful into the pond. Probably around the 1870s, someone decided to bring some of the horned fruits to this country, perhaps thinking the plant would look nice in a neighborhood millpond. An illustrated flora of the northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions. USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database | Britton, N.L., and A. And why not? These pods contain the life force of an alien invader. ![]() There is indeed something about them that suggests science fiction. More than one person has commented that it first seemed to be part of a broken action figure, a tiny Darth Vader helmet perhaps, or part of a model of the creature from the Alien movies. Many people - including adults - when they examine one of the little gray knots of spikes for the first time puzzle over whether it is human-made or organic. The children find them - first one, then another, then dozens of them - as they explore the shoreline of the Hudson. “A child said to me What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands,” Walt Whitman famously wrote in “Song of Myself.” Here in the park, when a child comes running up to us with hands full of something that needs explaining, as often as not it’s a handful of dark gray objects, each about an inch or two across with four curved, spike-like “horns” projecting from a knobby hub. ![]()
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