A DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE OF INDIANA 



WEEDS. 



THE GRASS FAMILY. GRAMINEJE. 



Annual or perennial herbs having the stems (culms) usually 

 hollow, their joints closed: leaves alternate, linear and sheathing 

 the stem, the sheaths split or open on the side opposite the blade ; 

 roots fibrous. Flowers usually in panicled spikes, composed of little 

 spikes called spikelets ; calyx and corolla absent but they and their 

 involucre represented by chaffy scales or bracts, known as glumes ; 

 stamens usually 3, anthers attached at middle at the point of the 

 filament (Fig. 11, d) and swinging loosely thereon, thus enabling 

 the wind to easily pollenize the hairy or feather-like stigmas; 

 ovary 1-celled with a single ovule. Fruit a seed-like "grain." 



A very large and most important family furnishing the food- 

 grains (cereals) of man, and the principal food of cattle. About 

 175 species of grasses are known to grow wild in Indiana, the ma- 

 jority of them being tufted, turf -forming plants, marked by under- 

 ground rootstocks which branch and creep beneath the surface of 

 the soil. ^Their flower clusters vary greatly in form and size, 

 ranging from the solid spikes of timothy and foxtail to the loose 

 and straggling clusters of the panicums and blue-grass. Among 

 them are many forms which, though at times furnishing grasses for 

 stock, are enemies of cultivated crops, being introduced into the 

 fields by the sowing of their seeds with grain or other grass seeds. 

 Ten of the worst of these are herewith described as weeds while 5 

 others are mentioned. 



"Grass is the most widely distributed of all vegetable life, and 

 is at once the type of our life and emblem of our mortality. Lying 

 in the sunshine among the buttercups and dandelions of May, 

 scarcely higher in intelligence than the minute tenants of that 

 mimic wilderness, our earliest recollections are of grass, and when 

 the fitful fever is ended and the foolish wrangle of the market and 

 the forum is closed, grass heals over the scar which our descent into 

 the bosom of the earth has made, and the carpet of the infant be- 

 comes the blanket of the dead. 



"Grass is the forgiveness of nature her constant benediction. 



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