A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
eelgrass
Eelgrass is a flowering plant that lives in the sea. It is not a seaweed and not an alga; it has roots, stems, leaves, and flowers, and it descends from land plants that went back into the water. It grows in sheltered shallow bays on soft bottom, in meadows that can run for miles, and it flowers and pollinates underwater, releasing threadlike pollen that drifts to the next plant on the current.
Etymology
The English name is for the long ribbon leaves, which move in the current the way an eel does. The scientific name, Zostera, is the Greek word for a belt or a girdle, describing the same leaves from a different angle. Coastal languages named it for what it was used for as often as for what it looked like, and it appears in Danish and Dutch as sea straw and in French as sea grass.
Notes
Eelgrass was a building material for centuries around the North Sea and the Baltic. On the Danish island of Læsø, houses were roofed with thatch of it laid meters thick, and some of those roofs are still standing after three hundred years. It was also the standard stuffing for mattresses and upholstery, and the packing material in early refrigerated shipping.