Culturally Significant Plant Plays Important Role

sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata) is a native grass traditionally used by Native American cultures for many purposes

Sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata) is a native grass traditionally used by American Indian cultures for a variety of purposes.  The source of sweetgrass’s vanilla-like aroma is coumarin – a plant compound extracted over hundreds of years for its fragrance and medicinal properties.

American Indian cultures burn braided sweetgrass twists in traditional ceremonies, using the sweet scented smoke as a purifying incense.

The species is locally subject to over-collecting and is sensitive to grazing.  But the NRCS Bismarck, North Dakota Plant Materials Center (PMC) is helping to protect and conserve this unique grass.  A collection of northern-hardy sweetgrass, originating from a sandbar in the Missouri River near Bismarck, has been distributed throughout a multi-State area for testing and tribal propagation.  Additionally, propagation beds have been established at numerous reservations with plants being increased and distributed to tribal members.

Over the past 50 years, the Bismarck Plant Materials Center has provided plant solutions for the diverse landscapes in North Dakota, South Dakota and northern Minnesota. The Center has released over 40 improved conservation plants including varieties of blue grama, buffalograss, western wheatgrass, purple prairie clover, narrow-leaved coneflower, stiff sunflower and silver buffaloberry. The Center offers technical assistance for native landscaping, windbreaks, revegetating saline-alkaline soils, improving productivity of range and pasture lands, enhancing wildlife habitat and wetlands, and enhancing native prairie ecosystems.

The process begins each spring at the Bismarck PMC when rhizomes of sweetgrass are harvested from a sprigging bed in April to fill requests received through each State plant materials committee.

The rhizomes are divided and put into small individual containers to grow out in the greenhouse.  It is an early, cool-season plant species and growth is rapid.

Often seedheads are formed in the center’s greenhouse within three weeks of transplanting.  In the lathhouse during May, the plants are hardened off and ten plants each are readied to ship to cooperators at the end of the month.

When the young plants are placed in a garden like setting with good weed control, the plants establish quickly and rhizomes can spread rapidly.  It is possible to produce hundreds of new plants from rhizomes the first year and thousands the second year.

Approximately 165 orders of sweetgrass have been filled in the last seven years.  In that period of time, the number of rhizomes produced from those plants could easily be in the millions.
 Your contact is Dwight Tober, NRCS plant materials specialist, at 701-530-2075.