![\"Perennial](\"http:\/\/www.obsessedbynature.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/DSCN0226-Perennial-Ryegrass.jpg\")
<\/a>Ryegrass is a tough grass useful in lawns. Its neatly alternating spikelets make it easy to identify.<\/p>\n Cocksfoot is a taller grass with a head\u00a0 that somewhat resembles the shape of a bird’s foot with its chunky branching spikelets to left, centre and right .<\/p>\n Soft Brome is as its name suggests soft to the touch; its spikelets like most Bromes are compactly plump and rounded, they form a pattern of green and white stripes, and they have awns (little barley-like spines). It’s quite distinctive once you’ve seen it.<\/p>\n Barren Brome looks very different: perhaps its name comes from the way it appears to have nothing much in its seed-heads, which are thin, triangular and very spiky; the plant is altogether long and thin and dark purplish-brown.<\/p>\n Yorkshire Fog, a beautiful name for a lovely soft plant, is thick and tall with broad soft leaves and a remarkably thick, soft seedhead. It’s one of those plants you can recognise twenty yards off once you know it.<\/p>\n The reserve has some False Oat-grass which in theory we should be pulling out – it seem unlikely given the way it’s tightly integrated with the rest of the grasses and herbs, so it’s probably here to stay.<\/p>\n There seem to be several Fescue grasses in the thin strip of acid grassland along the line of the old railway – the clinker that the sleepers rested on consisted of chunky angular chips of hard acid rock from somewhere far from London. One is Sheep’s Fescue: there may be Red Fescue, and there is something that looks like one of the taller Fescues too.<\/p>\n The Meadowgrasses have a typical light open panicle for their seedhead, giving a rather delicate appearance with their slim stems. I carefully checked which kind this one was; it has a pointed ligule where the leaf joins the stem, and is gently rough with little hairs, so it’s the Rough Meadowgrass.<\/p>\n In the woods near the path there are tufts of a broad-leaved grass that tolerates shade: it’s the Wood Melick.\u00a0 Finally, there’s one conspicuous grasslike plant that enjoys the wetter places here: the Pendulous Sedge. It’s a bit invasive but so handsome that I always admire it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With the light changing all the time in a showery airstream (and the Met. Office seemingly unable to get the forecast right for the last several days, wrong every time to my surprise), things looked hopeless for butterflies (just a Speckled Wood or two) and insects (a few leaf beetles, hoverflies and bees). So we … Continue reading Grasses at Gunnersbury Triangle<\/span> <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>