Illustrated Descriptions of the Grasses 



Straw-colour, remains throughout the season, the heads bristly 

 and lacking the gracefulness that was theirs in early spring. 



Fringed Brome- 

 grass, one of the 

 native species, is 

 most frequently 

 found in low 

 grounds, 

 where mead- 

 ow and wood- 

 land meet in 



a debatable border of half 

 thicket, half marsh, as the 

 meadow grasses give place 

 sedges and a few stragglers from 

 the thickets advance toward more 

 open country. The stems of Fringed Brome-grass 

 are stout and leafy, usually rising in groups which 

 are very noticeable above a lower growth of plants. 

 The panicles are large and are composed of slender 

 branches bearing silky, short-awned spikelets. 



Handsome groups of Chess are frequently seen 

 in old grain fields and on waste land, where this 

 grass appears as a weed, and in midsummer opens 

 heavy panicles of large spikelets. If every plant 

 is sometime "to be of utility in the arts" Chess 

 has as yet shown nothing but beauty as its excuse 

 for appearing so often where it is least wanted. 

 The panicles are striking and ornamental, but 

 Chess has met little favour either in this country 

 or abroad. With gifted imagination, and un- 

 troubled by the constancy of Nature, the peas- 

 antry of the Old World considered this grass a 

 degenerated wheat, and supplied the missing links 

 in the lineage by assuming sundry transmutations 

 in which a grain of wheat should send up a stalk 

 of rye, and the rye being sown should produce 

 barley, while from barley a Chess should be 

 grown that later, under favorable conditions, 

 might awaken to life under the form of oats. 



229 



Downy Brome-fzrass 



Bromus lectorum 



