Broomsedge is a native grass with an unfair reputation. Its tendency to colonize old fields, roadsides, and disturbed woodlands has led many to dismiss it as a weed, but walk past a stand in late October or November and the objection dissolves entirely. Green stems and leaves have by then shifted to dark red-purple and then to a vivid, burning orange that holds through the coldest months, giving the plant a flame-like quality in the low winter light. Early settlers gathered the dried stalks to make brooms, which explains the name if not the slightly misleading sedge part of it — this is a grass through and through.

It wants full sun, dry conditions, and poor barren soil, and it will grow in all of those without complaint. It tolerates partial sun and drier mesic soils but has no use for heavy mulch and performs poorly in a formal garden context. Its strengths are in wilder settings: as a ground cover in managed rural areas, as a backdrop in wildflower beds, as a filler along roadsides where almost nothing else will commit. Livestock and wildlife pass it by, which makes it useful as ground cover in grazed areas. Butterflies visit. Drought does not deter it. A long-lived plant that earns its keep at the margins, broomsedge is at its most persuasive in the brief, orange weeks of autumn.