Get started identifying the common grasses found in urban and ruderal habitats.
Thank you all so much for continuing to read this series of plant cribs – they are evolving over time and it is great to hear your feedback! These resources have been designed primarily for a beginner’s botany course I am leading as part of my role with the Natural History Society of Northumbria but it is wonderful to see them being read, downloaded and importantly, used by so many people online. While I don’t proclaim to be an expert, and there may well be mistakes within, I hope they are coming in useful to someone, somewhere.
After tackling willowherbs, yellow composites and several other pesky groups, I wanted to try something new this week with a crib to the various common and widespread grasses so many of us see on a daily basis. Specifically, those likely to pop up in a whole host of everyday habitats – verges, parks, wasteland and the like. I certainly found it useful to learn these before straying into more complex (and often frustrating) grass species.
Identifying grasses requires at least a basic understanding of plant anatomy and it is useful to know the name of the various parts. This blog post, by Awkward Botany, would be a good starting point.
While this page contains the species that you are most likely to come across in most situations, most of the time, you should remember that there are a great many confusion species out there. A good starting point for taking your interest in grasses further would be this book by the Species Recovery Trust.
Identifying Common Grasses
The crib below covers a 25 species judged to be common and widespread in North East England, and elsewhere in the UK too. The species covered are:
- Cock’s-foot
- Annual, Rough, Smooth and Wood Meadow-grass
- Yorkshire Fog
- Creeping Soft-grass
- Common & Creeping Bent
- Tufted Hair-grass
- Wavy Hair-grass
- Red & Sheep’s-fescue
- False Oat-grass
- Barren & Soft-brome
- Bearded and Common Couch
- Perennial & Italian Rye-grass
- Crested Dog’s-tail
- Meadow & Marsh Foxtail
- Timothy
- Smaller Cat’s-tail
Enjoying this series? Please consider sharing this page with friends or better still, providing a back-link so that more people can find it.
I hope to also produce similar sheets for wetland and coastal grasses, as well as an abridged version of the above featuring another dozen or so species very soon.
