The Book of Grasses 



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ize, as do no other plants, the heat of summer with its hay fields 

 and the endless, iterant call of the cicada. 



In drier places Brown Bent- 

 grass {Agrostis canina) is often 

 found in bloom a month before 

 the common Red-top, and it is 

 also frequently seen in moister 

 meadows as a red-brown mist 

 closery following the blossoming 

 of Velvet Grass. In bloom the 

 plant calls to mind a miniature 

 Red-top, but the leaves are 

 narrower than those of the latter 

 species, the basal leaves being 

 almost bristle-form, while the 

 flowering scale differs in devel- 

 oping a dorsal awn. Brown 

 Bent is often seen on lawns 

 and it is also quite common 

 near the coastwise marshes of 

 New England and New Jersey, where under the 

 hot sunlight the widely open panicles of this 

 grass rarely vary in colour from brown or 

 brownish purple, flecked with white by the small 

 anthers. 



Thin-grass {Agrostis perennans) is well de- 

 scribed by its common name. The panicles are 

 very pale green, rarely tinged with purple, and 

 the short branches, with the branchlets and 

 pedicels, are widely spreading. The whole plant 

 is weak and slender, and the tiny flowers, open- 

 ing soon after Brown Bent blossoms, are in out- 

 ward appearance not unlike those of a small 

 Red-top that has lost its colour through growing 

 in a shaded place, but in examining a blossom with 

 the microscope the palet is seen to be minute or 

 lacking. Thin-grass is most frequently found in 

 the damp soil of shaded pastures, and it is one of 

 the comparatively few grasses that ascend the 

 highest mountains of the Appalachians. 

 1 16 



Rtd-top Agrostis alba 



