Grass Gardens, and their Utility. 113 



brought forward on this point clearly prove that any certain 

 soil will maintain a greater, and produce more nutritious 

 produce, if cropped with a number of different species of 

 grasses, than it will maintain and produce if cropped with 

 only one or two species. This is a curious and important 

 fact, and which has been unnoticed in previous works on 

 the subject, as well as neglected in practice. If an acre 

 of good land is sown with three pecks of rye-grass, and one 

 peck of the clovers, or trefoil, 470 plants only will be 

 maintained on the square foot of such land; if a larger 

 quantity of these seeds is sown, whether of these two species, 

 or of any other two, the extra number of plants vegetated, 

 (which will certainly appear at first if the seeds are good,) 

 will decay in a short time, and leave blank spaces to be filled 

 up with weeds or spurious grasses; or, in fact, plants of 

 different species, supplied by the soil, manure, or neighbouring 

 hedges. But if, instead of two species of grasses, from eight 

 to twenty different sorts are sown on the same soil, or that 

 now alluded to, a thousand plants will be maintained on the 

 same space, and the weight of produce in herbage and in hay 

 increased in proportion. (Hort. Gram. Wob. pp. 24. 245.) 

 It may be truly said, therefore, that every variety of soil 

 and situation, from the alpine rock to water itself, is pro- 

 vided with its appropriate grasses, destined for the support of 

 animal life, and for covering the soil with the colour most 

 pleasing to man. 



The shades of green colour in the herbage of the dif- 

 ferent grasses are numerous, and highly interesting, as 

 may be proved by applying these varieties of tints to the 

 test of the practical system of colours, by that eminent 

 artist, G. Hayter, Esq. exhibited in the diagram inserted 

 in the Hortus Ericaeus Woburnensis ; or by comparing at 

 the same and at different seasons a select number of the 

 leaves of distinct species. The colouring matter of grasses, 

 when the saccharine and mucilaginous principles are in 

 much less proportion, as is found in the leaves or latter- 

 math late in autumn, in general accompanies the solution 

 of the constituents of the nutritive matter. After the first 

 evaporation of the solution, the green colouring matter maybe 

 destroyed and again recovered successively, by alternate 

 solution and evaporation in water and in alcohol. The im- 

 portant law in the natural economy of the grasses before 

 alluded to, which provides that a number of many different 

 species should always be found intimately combined ; that one 

 species should not exist or thrive for any length of time by 

 itself, even in its natural soil ; and that a greater number of 

 plants is maintained on the same soil, and a greater weight 



