Cat Tails

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

Mark Twain

Typha latifolia is the Latin name for the Common Cattail or Cat-O’-Nine-Tails, which “is a grass-like native plant to North Carolina.” (From the North Carolina University State Extension website ). These plants are edible and can “produce more starch per acre than crops like potatoes and yams ”, per the Farmers’ Almanac . Warning: “Do NOT try to eat the catkins when they have gone to seed… you’ll just get a mouthful of fluff.”

About the author

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He was praised as the “greatest humorist the United States has produced”, with William Faulkner calling him “the father of American literature”. Twain’s novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the “Great American Novel”. He also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and cowrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. The novelist Ernest Hemingway claimed that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”