MORTUS GRAM1XEUS WOBURNENSIS. 149 



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duce* is always much greater when combined with other grasses 

 than when cultivated by itself : with a proper admixture it will 

 nearly double its produce, though on the same soil, so much it 

 delights in shelter. Those spots in pastures that are most closely 

 eaten down, consist for the most part of this grass : I have exa- 

 mined many pastures with this view, and always found it the case 

 wherever this grass was more predominant. From all which it 

 appears, that the Poa trivialis, though highly valuable as a per- 

 manent pasture grass on rich and sheltered soils, is but little 

 adapted for the alternate husbandry, and unprofitable for any pur- 

 pose on dry exposed situations. It flowers towards the end of 

 June, and ripens the seed in the middle of July. 



FESTUCA pratensis. Meadow Fescue. 



Specific character : Panicle nearly upright, branched, spreading, 

 turned to one side ; spikelets linear, compressed ; florets nu- 

 merous, cylindrical, obscurely ribbed ; nectary four-cleft ; 

 root fibrous. Sm. Engl. Fl. i. p. 147. 



Refer. Fig. 1. Spikelet magnified, shewing florets and the 

 calyx. 2. Four-cleft nectary. 3. Obovate germen, with its 

 short styles and thick feathery stigmas. 



Native of Britain. Root fibrous, perennial. 



Obs. Dr. Withering makes this a variety of the Fesluca elatior; 

 but it is more justly made a distinct species in Sir J. E. Smith's 

 English Botany, and in his English Flora. It differs from 

 the Festuca elatior in having only half the height, the leaves 

 only half the breadth, the panicle shorter, and containing 

 only half the number of flowers. The panicle is but once 

 branched, droops but slightly, and leans to one side when in 

 flower, and the flowers grow all one way. In the elatior the 



* According to the account which is given of this grass by Mr. Swayne, in 

 Dr. Witkering's Arrangement of British Plants, it is the famous Orcheston grass. 

 I am surprised to find it remarked of this grass, so long back as 1681, that " at 

 Maddington, in Wiltshire, about nine miles from Salisbury, grows a grass, in a 

 small plot of meadow ground, which grass in some years grows to a prodigious 

 length, sometimes twenty -four feet long, but not in height, as is usually reported ; 

 the length being caused by the washing of a sheep-down, that the rain in a hasty 

 shower brings with it much of the sheep dung over the meadow ; so that in such 

 springs as are not subject to such showers this grass thriveth not so well." Worlidge. 

 The report of a grass growing twenty-four feet in height must have excited no 

 ordinary attention. 



