The popular name given to plants of the family Graminae. Although shallow-rooted, the leaves of grasses (unlike those of other plants) grow from below not at the tips - this allows grasses to withstand heavy grazing by animals. Wind-pollinated, the flowers of grasses have become much reduced.
Grasses are of immense importance to mankind as they form our main food crops in the form of wheat, rice, maize, barley, oats and others.
Chalk and limestone grasslands have several characteristic species of grass including Common Quacking Grass (Breza media) and Tor Grass (Brachypodium pinnatum) which forms large, yellow-green, circular patches and is so coarse that only the hungriest animal will eat it.
The wood False Brome (Brachypodium sylvaticum), a close relative of the Tor Grass (Brachypodium pinnatum) has much softer leaves and lawns on it's flowers; it often grows with the much taller Wood Millet (Milium effusum) which has dark green leaves and branches of flowering heads bent downwards.
Grass feeds domestic livestock throughout the year; some seven months of grazing are available in the summer while hay and silage are used for the other five.
It may also be cut when young and tender, artificially dried and sold powdered and fed as a vitamin rich meal to livestock.
Grazing is sometimes controlled with electric fences, thus presenting the livestock with fresh areas of grass daily.
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| | Untended land will be taken over by grass and weeds such as black grass on arable land and annual meadow grass in pastures. These naturally prevelant grasses are less nutritious than the farmer would like thus farmers sow their fields with specially bred grasses.
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Usually sown with clover, the grass may be a monoculture or a mixture of four or five varieties; the most commonly used are varieties of timothy grass (Phleum pratense), perennial rye grass (Lolium perenne), Italian rye grass (Lolium multiflorum), cocksfoot (Dactylis glomerata), meadow fesque (Festuca pratensis) and tall fesque (Festuca arundinacea).
Other plants may be sown on pastures with the grass so that their deeper roots bring up minerals from the soil, or in the case of white clovers, fix atmospheric nitrogen. Others include chicory, dandelion, plantain, ribwort and yarrow.
