Grass is just grass. Or is it? Where we live grass is pretty important to a lot of the local folks. Their business is livestock and they care about the grasses their animals eat. And as it becomes late spring, all the grasses get big, put out their pollen and drop their seeds. So I thought I'd take a closer look at the grasses that grow on our land.
I took samples of all the grasses that I could find on our land. I found maybe 8 different varieties of cool season grasses. I looked at the few books we had that talked about grasses. There is no popular grass identification book out there. With the help of these sometimes scientific, sometimes business-oriented guides, I was able to identify only three of the grasses I had collected.
But as we know, first hand experience is often better than the information you can get from a book. So I asked the folks over at Sandhill and our neighbor Oren whether they could identify the grasses I had collected. And you know what? Mostly they knew at least the common name for many of those grasses, if not what kind of land they grew on and their origin. Or they would laugh and admit that they had always just called it a weed.
It was really exciting to walk around and begin to understand the land through the grass that grew on it. But, in looking closer at the grass, I noticed that there were many more kinds of grass that I hadn't seen before. Maybe as many as I had found the first time. So I started the process all over again.
I'm not guaranteeing that what I'm calling the grasses is their correct name. But with the help of books and friends, here's a sampling of what I learned:
Reeds Canary grass can grow to 6 feet and is very adaptable, though it likes wet soil. It has wide leaves and a seed head that grows in bushy bunches. It's a Eurasian grass. Its roots are very strong and create a mat, so it can be used for soil conservation in erodable areas. And I'm going to save some seed to try and use it for that in the Fall.
Timothy looks like very small cattail. It grows to about 2 feet and is also called "meadow's cattail" or "head grass". When it goes to flower, the stamens and pistils form a purplish halo around the seed head. It is also a Eurasian grass.
Smooth Bromegrass is a perennial which grows to about 3-4 feet. The seed clusters form a sort of torpedo shape and hang down off the stalks. When it goes to flower, you can see the large stamens and pistils hanging out of the seeds clusters coated with yellow pollen. The most positive identification of this grass can be done by turning over a mature leaf and looking for an "m" or "w" imprinted towards the tip on the underside of the leaf. It is also a Eurasian grass.
Sedges are some of the only native cool season grasses that are abundant here. Sedge, or water grass, is a kind of grass distinguished by a triangular stem. I could not find anyone who could identify the names of the different sedges. Of the kinds I found, the seedheads are unusual looking, with hard clumps. As you may guess, it is often found in wet areas. Pictured is the leafy three square sedge (a.k.a. salt-marsh bulrush).
It has been strange to realize that most of the grasses that are so familiar are from other continents. It makes me think more about my concept of "natural". And it makes me wonder what this land may have looked like a few hundred years ago, before Europeans came with their invasive grasses and propensity for cutting down the trees and raising domesticated livestock. Our little chunk of land, quite "natural" by today's standards, would not have been very natural at all among the native flora that once thrived here.
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