'Just grass'? It's so much more!

To her enduring credit, my mum has again this year allowed her back lawn to become a pop-up meadow. Even her gardener, George, who used to be a greenkeeper at a golf club, accepted the idea with relatively good grace.

With her meadows, mum has gone for the ‘picture framing’ technique in which the ‘meadows’ are in two square blocks in the middle of the lawn and George mows strips around the all margins plus a route through the middle to her bench.

Next week, we’ll look at some of the pitfalls of the pop-up meadow – and how to avoid them or overcome them. But this week I want to use mum’s minimeadow to celebrate something in nature that is all too often ignored or relegated to the ‘boring’ box: grass.

It has long been thus. Gilbert White, the 18^th century naturalist said, “Of all sorts of vegetation the grasses seem to be the most neglected”. He felt that no-one seems “to distinguish the perennial from the annual, the perennial from the tender.”

Indeed, our Magpie-like fixation with all things glittery and gaudy like colourful flowers means that for most people grass is just grass. It’s green, sport gets played on it and cows eat it. End of story.

But the grass family is vital for humankind (think Wheat, Barley, Rice, Oats, Papyrus, Common Reed) and it is similarly essential for all sorts of wildlife that feed on the leaves, roots and seeds or live among the mini-jungle of stems and grass blades.

And when you allow your lawn to grow and the grasses to flower, you discover that hiding in plain sight are all sorts of different types of grass that have their own understated beauty.

Now I don’t claim to be a grass identification expert – there are some tricky ones out there that require an expert’s eye. But it is easy to get to know at least some of them, and to appreciate how different they are. 

So, here are the main grasses that have seized the moment and revealed themselves in my mum’s pop-up meadow:

• Perennial Ryegrass. This is THE main grass found in lawn grass seed, rolls of lawn turf, and sown grass fields for livestock, so expect to find it in your lawn. The flower spikelets clasp the stem in a flat zigzag. Unfortunately, it isn’t especially good for wildlife.

The other grasses I found are not typically part of a commercial lawn seed mix, so presumably have arrived under their own steam a some point and colonised the lawn.

• Yorkshire Fog. Another very common grass, where the cluster of flower spikelets starts as a pinkish soft ‘tail’ (below) that then flops open. It is the main foodplant of the Small Skipper butterfly.

• Barren Brome. A grass of weedy places, often rather reddish in colour, with each cluster of flowers on a long dangly fine-wire stem.

• Crested Dog’s-tail. A grass of old hay meadows, with a one-sided dense upright spike of flowers.

• Meadow Barley. The flowers of the barleys all have long bristles – called awns – giving the flower spike a shaggy look.

• Cock’s-foot. A tall wild grass, with very randomly arranged clusters of flower spikelets, each cluster on a wiry stem. The main foodplant of Essex and Large Skipper butterflies.

What I didn’t find, however, were grasses with finer blades, such as the bents and fscues, which are important as foodplants for butterflies such as Meadow Brown, Gatekeeper and Marbled White.

So, if you've grown a minimeadow this year or next time you're in a park or real meadow, look beyond the flashy flowers for a few moments and marvel at the mix of grass species that are likely to be there, understanding that their variety is important for all sorts of meadow wildlife.