Grass

Our roadsides and fields are tuning up their late-summer symphony of color, with showy purple loosestrife, Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrod and others all competing for attention. But waiting for their moment in the spotlight, like botanical violas, are the under-appreciated grasses.

Despite their enormous economic importance to people and their amazing diversity and resilience, grasses are often taken for granted. Much of the world’s food comes from grasses, including wheat, corn, rice, barley, rye, sorghum and millet.  Grasslands cover as much as a third of the earth’s surface, and there are more species of grass the world over than in any other family of vascular plants except composites (daisies  and their relatives) and orchids.

Most grasses share certain characteristics, including having hollow, round stems with joints and long, narrow leaves with parallel veins.  Many have aggressive growth habits, such as rhizomes — horizontal stems that spread underground and send up new shoots.

Although we don’t usually think of grasses this way, many of them are in flower this time of year.  The individual flowers are tiny and highly modified structures, with scales and other specialized parts, but in different species they come in highly distinctive clusters that form a wide variety of shapes. Identifying grasses from these flower clusters is challenging, but not impossible.

I recently collected a handful of grasses from Grandview Farm in Sharon. Among them were many of the common species, a mix of natives and aliens, that one would expect in a typical hayfield.  They included foxtails, Timothy, bromes, reed canary grass, fowl meadow grass and fescues.

There is much to enjoy in the subtle beauty of these perennial understudies.  A great place to start is with the book “Grasses: An Identification Guide,†by Lauren Brown, available in many libraries and bookstores.

Sightings: From Larry Smith of Sharon comes a report of a bobcat on Mudge Pond Road.

Fred Baumgarten is a naturalist and writer. He can be reached at fredb58@sbcglobal.net. His blog is at thatbirdblog.blogspot.com.