Bluegrass

“ Bluegrass.
Your marine buffaloes must wear anchors around their necks, instead of cow-bells.{35}
Scythe.
Not so. Nature always provides for her creatures; for, as birds soaring above the mountain-tops have great wings of feathers, so, on the other hand, these cattle have immense hoofs, of a substance resembling lead, but much heavier than the lead of commerce.
Whetstone.
That adds to their commercial value. Major Bluegrass, you’re my private secretary, and editor of my Cornville Eagle: what do you know about the sea? ”

“ It was a species of Poa, closely akin in its characteristics to Poa Pratensis, the famous Bluegrass of Kentucky [Pg 49] —a cosmopolitan grass; at home everywhere, but always seeking congenial skies; rooting itself firmly and clinging tenaciously; standing in with the rich soils and the strong races ”

“ Two of the travellers were ladies from the bluegrass and scarcely one of all the natives lingering about the workings had ever seen a lady from the bluegrass, while, to the young surveyors and the group of civil engineers who had, for months, been exiled by their work among the mountains from all association with such lovely creatures, it was a joy to stand apart and covertly gaze at them. ”

“ Second, grass populations change with the seasons. Cool-season grasses (foxtail barley, Indian rice grass, Kentucky bluegrass, needle-and-thread grass, Sandberg blue grass, and slender wheatgrass) flourish during spring and fall. During the warm summer the blue grama, inland saltgrass, little bluestem, prairie cordgrass, prairie sandreed, and switchgrass predominate. This natural adaptation to seasonal conditions uses the greatest potential of the growing season and at the same time provides species that will flourish in both wet and dry cycles. ”

“ Poa pratensis is a common lawn and pasture grass, P. annua is a weed species. The bluegrasses begin to grow in late winter about Lawrence, Kansas, and they remain green until late in the fall. During this time, the voles eat the blades and heads of bluegrass, and make their runways under the culms. The prairie voles utilize several species of Bromus. ”

“ To Boone Wellver, this journey was as full of mystifying and alluringly colourful events as a mandarin's cloak is crusted with the richness of embroidery. Save for his ingrained sense of a man's obligation to maintain always an incurious dignity, he would have looked through widened eyes of amazement from the first miles of his travelling. When the broken raggedness of peaks began to flatten toward the billowing bluegrass, his wonder grew. There at home the world stood erect and lofty. ”

“ One distinction of the blue-grass region is the forests, largely of gigantic oaks, free of all undergrowth, carpeted with the close-set, luscious, nutritive blue-grass, which remains green all the season when it is cropped by feeding. The blue-grass thrives elsewhere, notably in the upper Shenandoah Valley, where somewhat similar limestone conditions prevail ”

“ Then, lo! as if by some freakish return of the spring to the edge of winter the pastures are suddenly as fresh and green as those of May. The effect on one who has the true landscape passion is transporting and bewildering. Such contrasts of color it is given one to study nowhere but in blue-grass lands. It is as if the seasons were met to do some great piece of brocading. One sees a new meaning in Poe's melancholy thought—the leaves of the many-colored grass. ”

“ Such a look of leisure, of freedom, of amplitude, as these forest groves give to the landscape!
What vistas, what aisles, what retreats, what depths of sunshine and shadow! The grass is as [228] uniform as a carpet, and grows quite up to the boles of the trees. One peculiarity of the blue-grass is that it takes complete possession of the soil; it suffers no rival; it is as uniform as a fall of snow. Only one weed seems to hold its own against it, and that is ironweed, a plant like a robust purple aster five or six feet high. This is Kentucky's one weed, so far as I saw. ”

“ There is no repose in a prairie; it is stagnation, it is a dead level. Those immense stretches of flat land pain the eye, as if all life and expression had gone from the face of the earth. There is just unevenness enough in the blue-grass region to give mobility and variety to the landscape. From almost any given point one commands broad and extensive views—of immense fields of wheat or barley, or corn or hemp, or grass or clover, or of woodland pastures. ”

“ The most widespread habitat of the cleared upland on the south part of the preserve is the blue-grass habitat. In this [Pg 13] habitat the blue-grass, Poa, is the dominant plant, growing to a height of usually not over 0.5 meter. With the blue-grass are associated a few thistles, yarrow, and several other herbs. During the whole period of my stay in the region, July and August, the habitat was very dry, and the grass and herbs had mostly dried up. ”

“ Yes, though after a few years blue-grass, on a true blue-grass soil, roots every other grass out and reigns with a divided empire with white clover. 4. Any good corn or wheat soil will produce good blue-grass—the usual method of obtaining a blue-grass pasture is as follows: To one bushel of good timothy seed one quart of red clover is added, and this quantity is made to cover from five to six acres. The seeding may be done in the fall with fall grain, in the spring with oats, or on stubble or wheat land on the snow in February. ”

“ Then in a few moments more the train had shot us fairly into the edge of the blue-grass region, and the farmer in me began to be on the alert. We had passed in a twinkling from a portion of the earth's surface which is new, which is of yesterday, to a portion which is of the oldest, from the carboniferous to the lower silurian. Here, upon this lower silurian, the earth that saw and nourished the great monsters and dragons was growing the delicate blue-grass. It had taken all these millions upon millions of years to prepare the way for this little plant to grow to perfection. ”

“ All winter the blue-grass continues green—it is always green, of course, never blue—and it even grows a little, except when the ground is frozen. Thus, year after year, drawing needful nourishment from the constantly disintegrating limestone below, flourishes here as nowhere else in the world this wonderful grass. ”

“ In the earliest spring nothing is sooner afield to contest possession of the land than the blue-grass. Its little green spear-points are the first to pierce the soft rich earth, and array themselves in countless companies over the rolling landscapes, while its roots reach out in every direction for securer foothold. ”

“ During July and August the blue-grass lies comparatively inactive, resting from fructification, and missing, as well, frequent showers to temper the sunshine. In seasons of severe drought it even dies quite away, leaving the surface of the earth as bare and brown as a winter landscape or arid plain. Where it has been closely grazed, one may, in walking over it, stir such a dust as one would raise on a highway ”

“ The grass, which takes its name from the animal, is plentiful in the valley of the Big Blue; it loves the streams of little creeks that have no bottom-land, and shelters itself under the sage. It is a small, moss-like gramen, with dark seed, and, when dry, it has been compared by travelers to twisted gray horsehair. Smaller herds travel in Indian file; their huge bodies, weighing 1500 lbs., appear, from afar, like piles erected to bridge the plain. ”

“ Still, I have no doubt there is a distinct variety of woman known as the blue-grass girl. A geologist told me that once when he was footing it over the State with a geologist from another State, as they approached the blue-grass region from the southward they were carefully examining the rock formation and studying the surface indications, which are usually marked on the border line, to determine exactly where the peculiar limestone formation began. ”

“ We should be surprised if a rich agricultural region, healthful at the same time, where there is abundance of food, and wholesome cooking is the rule, did not affect the tone of social life. And I am almost prepared to go further, and think that blue-grass is a specific for physical beauty and a certain graciousness of life. I have been told that there is a natural relation between Presbyterianism and blue-grass, and am pointed to the Shenandoah and to Kentucky as evidence of it. Perhaps Presbyterians naturally seek a limestone country. ”

“ On the intervals of prairie grow the grasses, soft, brown and ripe with last year’s growth, showing as yet but little of the green of this. These paint all the background of the scene with their olives and tans, as if the painter of it first made his background with grass, then set his figures and lights and shades upon this, the gray stubs, the deep brown trunks of living trees, the vivid green of the palmetto leaves and gold of sunlight and purple of shadows chasing one another over all. ”

“ The grasses which fill our meadows are very many of them foreign plants; among these are the vernal-grass, which gives such a delightful fragrance to the new-mown hay. The timothy is also an imported grass; so is the meadow-grass considered as the best of all for pasture; the orchard-grass much esteemed also; and the canary-grass, which yields a seed for birds. Some of the most troublesome weeds of this tribe are naturalized, as the darnel in pastures, the chess or cheat of the grain-fields; quaking-grass, quitch-grass, yard-grass, and crab-grass, also. ”

“ Wherever the rolling prairie-fires have been unable to sweep, there you see the shade of timber and bush; everywhere else is the blue and red stem, the blue and bunch-grass or the short, crisp buffalo-grass ”

“ The sage-brush is a singularly hardy plant, and grows right in the midst of deep sand, and among barren rocks, where nothing else in the vegetable world would try to grow, except “bunch-grass.”— [“Bunch-grass” grows on the bleak mountain-sides of Nevada and neighboring territories, and offers excellent feed for stock, even in the dead of winter, wherever the snow is blown aside and exposes it; notwithstanding its unpromising home, bunch-grass is a better and more nutritious diet for cattle and horses than almost any other hay or grass that is known—so stock-men say.] ”

“ The buffalo grass, having a short, rounded blade resembling the needles of a pine tree, and which cured like hay in the dry air, was very nutritious for the stock, but even where it grew, its small brown bunches covered but little of the soil. I have observed, and it is generally conceded, that the eastern prairie grass has of late each year spread westward, because "rain follows the plow." ”

“ All this year’s shoots of the swamp blueberry bushes are a restful green, but at the tips these, too, ripen into red, while on the higher ground the black huckle{165}berries and the birches show the same color till the landscape rolls away from you in a warm and cuddley glow that takes the nip out of the wind. Looking on these you know that the pasture cannot be cold, however deep the snows to come or however low the mercury in the thermometer may fall. ”

“ The blue grass (Andropogon sericeus) , is an annual of soft rapid growth, with a branching seed-stalk that breaks off and is blown by the wind in masses into waterholes; the blacks use the fine seeds of this grass for food.
“Anthistiria membranacea,” called the Flinders or Barcoo grass, is an annual of a reddish colour, found all over the western plains. It is soft and brittle, breaking easily off to fall on the ground, when stock will pick it up; it makes excellent hay, keeping sweet for years, and is one of the most fattening grasses. ”

“ Why, there hasn't been time for the bushes to grow. That's always the way with the blueberries, though: There may not have been the ghost of a sign Of them anywhere under the shade of the pine, But get the pine out of the way, you may burn The pasture all over until not a fern Or grass-blade is left, not to mention a stick, And presto, they're up all around you as thick And hard to explain as a conjuror's trick. ”

“ The Blue-eyed Grass is not a grass at all, but is so called on account of the grass-like leaves. The blue-purple, starry blossoms grow in loose clusters on stiff stems, and bloom from spring to midsummer. They remain open but a few hours in the morning withering as the day advances. The plants are 6-18 in. tall and are found on prairies, and foothills and in mountain meadows at 3000-10000 ft. ”

“ The evidences of this fertility are everywhere. Nature, even in those places where she has been forced for nearly a hundred years to bear much at the hands of a not always judicious agriculture, unceasingly struggles to cover herself with bushes of all sorts and nameless annual weeds and grasses. Even the blue-grass contends in vain for complete possession of its freehold. One is forced to note, even though without sentiment, the rich pageant of transitory wild bloom that will force a passage for itself over the landscape: firmaments of golden dandelions in the lawns ”

“ There is hardly a more striking feature in the landscape now-a-days than the red patches of blueberry and whortleberry bushes, as seen on a sloping hillside, like islands among the grass, with trees growing in them; or crowning the summit of a bare, brown hill with their somewhat russet liveliness ”

“ In the low ground buttercups were shining like gold dollars, sprinkled through the tall herdsgrass. Yellow-weed, the farmer's scourge, held up its brown and yellow head in defiance.
On a knoll, a little before I reached the graveyard, I passed over a piece of ground where the winter had killed the grass roots. Here I found sorrel, cinque-foil, and a few bunches of blue-eyed grass growing. Nature seemed to try to conceal the barrenness of the spot with beauty. ”