Floating Sweet-Grass

This is Floating Sweet-Grass, Glyceria fluitans, doing what it says on the tin. It is common in slightly nutrient enriched fresh water ditches where it forms rafts, as seen here.

Common Reed

This is Common Reed, Phragmites australis, which is a grass. It forms large beds on suitable substrate and has been of great economic importance historically, primarily as a roofing material. 
Ecologically reed beds provide habitat for a wide range of species. Three birds dependent on reed beds are the Bittern, Botaurus stellarius, the Reed Warbler, Acrocephalus scirpaceus, and the Bearded Reedling (aka the Bearded Tit), Panurus biarmicus. Many others are associated with them, e.g. Reed Bunting and Sedge Warbler.

Common Cord-grass

 

 

This is a genuinely interesting grass. No really. It is the primogenitor of saltmarsh succession, invariably the only plant to grow until it has trapped sufficient sediment to raise the land out of the tidal range inhospitable to the rest. Here it has formed a small patch of saltmarsh in Swansea Bay and was the only thing growing apart from seaweed. 
It is also the best understood example of allopolyploidy: the creation of a new, fertile species from the hybridization of two species followed by chromosome doubling. Common cord-grass, Spartina anglica, has evolved from the sterile hybrid Townsend's cord-grass, S. xtownsendii. This is a hybrid of Small cord-grass, S. maritima, and Smooth cord-grass, S. alterniflora. So you get a lot of cord-grass for your buck with this tough little critter.
Smooth cord-grass was introduced from North America and the hybrid arose around Southampton in the mid nineteenth century. S. anglica was first noticed in 1892 and its vigour and sediment-trapping ability was soon recognised. Consequently it was widely planted around the coast as part of sea-defences and land-reclamation. It can grow seaward of every other perennial plant! 

Marram Grass

This is perhaps the most familiar plant of British dunes: Marram grass, Ammophila arenaria. It's extensive rhizomes stabilise the sand preventing drifting of the dunes. The plant was harvested in the past for various uses, including thatching and basket-making, but this led to dune movement and loss of arable land and villages, especially in Denmark. Laws were introduced in Scotland in the seventeenth century and Denmark in the eighteenth century to prevent its removal.
The genus name derives from the Greek ammos: sand, and philia: lover. It is an example of a xerophyte, able to tolerate drought through various adaptations that help reduce water loss: waxy covering; inrolled leaves with stomata on the internal surface only; stomata situated in small pits; hairs to slow air movement across the leaf surface.

Sea Couch

Another new plant for me from the weekend's SBRS jaunt around Landport and Offham marshes. This striking tall blue-green grass is Sea Couch or Elytrigia atherica. It was growing along the bank of the Ouse, striking sculptural poses in small tufts, towering above the other grasses. Hard to ignore.
Looking at the top right photo you might be thinking "Lolium" or "rye grass" (according to your level of botanical initiation), but a glance at the top left photo reveals that the spikelets are arranged parallel to the inflorescence and not at right angles as is the case with rye grasses. (I see now that I'll have to find a rye grass to blog tomorrow!)

False Oat-grass

Just spent a while keying this one out. There's a small stand of it down in the orchard towering majestically above the Ox-eye daisies and other grasses.
Yesterday I failed to ID it, but today, using the key from the grass ID workshop I went on the other week (courtesy of the National Plant Monitoring Scheme, BSBI and Reading University) and my stereomicroscope, I got it.
I must say how much easier it is using the x20 setting on the microscope compared with a x10 hand lens. The colours and details of the glumes; the fact that the lower floret was male and the upper bisexual; the scabrous nature of the rachis and the twist in the lower lemma's awn were as plain as day. 
There really is a whole world of beauty beyond our visual limits and I can't recommend a stereomicroscope enough. You can pick up some really good ones on eBay for under £100.

Fern Grass

Today I was lucky to get a place on a grass identification workshop hosted by Reading University and run by Nick Law. It was free to 15 volunteers on the National Plant Monitoring Scheme and aimed at complete beginners to relative parvenus such as myself. Despite an early start after a broken night's sleep (on-call) I managed to concentrate as we were taken through keying out various specimens. Although I've keyed out a few grasses myself in the past it was great to do it with an expert and learn the variations of different definitions (especially the range of what is considered to be a 'panicle'!). 
At the end of the session we were given a tour around the University's herbarium which, coincidentally, houses the collection of Charles Edward Hubbard, one of the fathers of modern grass study and the author of a book on the identification of British grasses we'd used in the workshop.
At the end of the class we were given two specimens to take away and have a go at identifying on our own. This was one of them and I reckon it's Catapodium rigidum or fern grass.
An added bonus stemmed from the fact that my old chum Prof Hilson was in his office: we had lunch in the Harris gardens and Anna cooked a delicious dinner before I headed back down the motorways having missed the awful rush-hour(s) traffic. 

Cock's Foot

To continue the grassy theme, this is one of the easier to identify of the common grasses: cock's foot, orchard grass or Dactylis glomerata. (No prizes for guessing where this was growing.)
It is a key plant in one of the National Vegetation Classification categories (MG1) along with false oat-grass.
The National Vegetation Classification (NVC): now there's a thing. Very important in ecological circles!

Wall Barley

How gratifying to find wall barley, Hordeum murinum, growing by a wall.
This is growing by the prison wall along with what seems to be an endless variety of other plants, many of which have featured on this blog. 
It's biodiversity in action right on our doorstep, right under our noses, and largely ignored by everyone!

Wood Melick

Another pretty grass from the garden: Melica uniflora or Wood Melick. It is common except for the far north of Scotland and the islands. It is usually found in woods, especially the edges of rides and hedgebanks. It dies back in the winter, which is apparently unusual for a woodland grass. Seeds rarely germinate so its regeneration is mainly rhizomatous. 
The BSBI handbook tells me that not very much is known about its ecology, which seems odd to me but what do I know.

Sterile Brome

Bromus sterilis by HermannSchachner Wikimedia Commons

I finally managed to get out on a Sussex Botanical Recording Society field trip on Saturday. I think the last one I managed to get to was in 2013, which was also my first! I had been inspired to join after going on 'An Introduction to Botanical Recording' run by the BSBI. The woman who ran it was on Saturday's field trip, which was nice. 
We were surveying some ancient woodland south of the A27 west of Arundel which is under threat from 'road improvements'. I only hope the efforts of organisations like the SBRS help to prevent the continued attrition of our remaining fragments of decent habitat.
I say 'we'; the reality was that the eleven others spotted the species and shouted out the Latin binomial abbreviations used for recording whilst I struggled to work out which plants were being referred to, usually resorting to asking someone what was what. They kindly took me under their collective wing and taught me the identification features of this and that, including some grasses and sedges.
Part of the motivation to really get out there was reading about the new National Plant Monitoring Scheme in the current issue of British Wildlife. This is a new collaboration between the BSBI and Plantlife to allow long term monitoring of the flora in various habitats of interest. It was inspired in part by the similar schemes run by the BTO, such as the Breeding Bird Survey and Wetland Birds Surveys which I've done for the last five or six years. So in a burst of enthusiasm I've signed up to survey a 1km x 1km Ordnance Survey square in the Ashdown Forest. My information pack arrived today and it is very impressive. Furthermore there are a number of free training days being run around the UK for volunteers and I've signed up for the Grasses Identification workshop at Reading University on 8th June. 
Grasses, sedges and ferns are, to me anyway, a step up from identifying what we think of as wildflowers. I've got some superb books, but the jargon can be opaque to the beginner (see 28th February!), making the keying out of specimens a real headache. 
But you know what they say... practice makes one a little better than one was before. So I've decided to have a bit of blitz on grasses in preparation for the workshop.
This is a rather pretty grass growing plentifully by our polytunnel and here and there in the orchard. It is very long and wispy with a lovely purplish hue. I have just spent a good 40 minutes keying it out in three different books and can confidently announce that it is Bromus sterilis or Sterile Brome. Hurrah!

Annual Meadow-grass

A first from this taxon - the Poaceae or grasses. This one is famously ubiquitous and flowers year round. It is Poa annua or Annual Meadow-grass and is evolved to colonise any disturbed ground rapidly. It can grow and set seed in as little as six weeks; a single plant may produce up to 20,000 seeds or as few as 10; seeds may germinate immediately or can remain dormant for a long time; it is native and is naturalized around the world, being found on mountain tops in the tropics. 
The terminology for grasses is bewildering for the beginner and I struggle to key out new species. To give you a flavour here are some excerpts from the entry in BSBI Handbook No.13 - Grasses of the British Isles for P. annua: "...procumbent culms rooting at the nodes;... sheaths compressed and keeled, smooth; ligule ...blunt; blades thin, flat or folded, glabrous, often wrinkled when young, abruptly pointed or hooded at the tip. Panicle ovate or triangular, loose and open or rarely lightly contracted, the branches solitary or paired, rarely 3 together, smooth, spreading or reflexed at maturity. Spikelets ovate or oblong, 3 - 6 flowered; glumes unequal, acute at the tip, the lower lanceolate to narrowly ovate, 1-nerved, the upper elliptic or oblong, 3-nerved; lemmas semi-elliptic to ovate in profile, ...sparsely to densely hairy on the keel and lateral nerves below, rarely glabrous, blunt at the tip; palea with curled or crispate hairs on the keels, these dense or sparese, rarely absent; anthers 0.6-1.1mm." Luckily there are excellent illustrations.
The grasses, Poaceae, are the most important plant family from an economic point of view. They are part of the order Poales, which includes the sedges and rushes.