Grasses, sedges, rushes : an identification guide

270 Pages·2020·14.18 MB·English

by  Lauren Brown

Grasses, Sedges, Rushes

Grasses,
An Identification Guide
Sedges,
Lauren Brown and Ted Elliman
Original drawings by Lauren Brown
Foreword by Jerry Jenkins
Rushes
New Haven and London
Published with support from The Helen
Printed in China.
Clay Frick Foundation and from Peter
and Sofia Blanchard. Library of Congress Control Number:
2019949034
Published with assistance from the
ISBN 978- 0- 300- 23677- 4
foundation established in memory of
(paperback—flexibound : alk. paper)
Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class
of 1894, Yale College. A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Copyright © 2020 by Lauren Brown
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/
and Ted Elliman.
NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
All rights reserved.
Original line drawings © 1979, 2020 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
by Lauren Brown.
Drawing on page i: switch panicgrass
Panicum virgatum
An earlier version of this book was ( ), Lauren Brown.
Grasses: An Identification Guide Avena sativa
published as Photo on frontispiece: oat ( ),
in 1979 by Houghton Mifflin Company. H. Zell/Wikimedia Commons.
This book may not be reproduced, in
whole or in part, including illustrations,
in any form (beyond that copying permitted
by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright
Law and except by reviewers for the public
press), without written permission from the
publishers.
Yale University Press books may be
purchased in quantity for educational,
business, or promotional use. For
information, please e- mail
[email protected] (U.S. office) or
[email protected] (U.K. office).
Set in Utopia, Meta, and Bunday Sans type
by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
To John and Charlotte
LB
To Alice, with love
TE
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Contents
Foreword by Jerry Jenkins / ix
Preface / xi
Acknowledgments / xiii
Introduction / 1
The American Prairie: Ecology and History / 7
How to Use This Book / 17
Glossary / 19
Identification Key / 23
Species Descriptions and Illustrations / 31
Some Identification Aids / 215
A Word on Rare and Invasive Species / 221
If You Do Not Find Something in This Book / 223
Credits / 237
Index / 243
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Foreword
Grasses
Lauren Brown’s appeared in 1979. It was a small beauty:
240 pages, about 125 grasses and sedges, a dozen other plants
that looked grasslike, all organized by the way the plants looked
in the field. Lovely pen- and- ink drawings, calligraphic head-
ings, simple, focused prose. It made friends quickly, treated
them well, and has kept them for forty years.
To keep them, it had to solve a fundamental problem. To
cover grasses and sedges well takes space; they don’t reduce
to small drawings and field marks like birds. Also, there are
a lot of them—sixteen hundred in the United States, several
hundred in the Northeast. So a grass-a nd- sedge guide must be
either big and complicated or small and incomplete. If big, it
scares the beginners. If small and simple, it leaves out common
plants and frustrates users.
Going small sounds easier, but it isn’t. Knowing what to put
in and what to leave out is hard. Everything, or almost every-
thing, that readers are likely to see must go in, or they won’t
trust the book. All the things they won’t see, or won’t see at
first, must be left out, or they will get bogged down. Doing this
requires visualizing, in detail, where readers may go and what
they will see. Very few people have that sort of knowledge.
Lauren does. Her solution was to realize that the agricul-
tural and post- agricultural countryside of the Northeast is, in
effect, a biome to itself. As long as her readers stayed within
it, they would only see around a hundred of the grasses and
sedges, a manageable number. By restricting herself to this
countryside—I call it the common landscape—she could cover
the species her readers would see every day. Not, certainly, the
plants of the wild and special places. But rather the neighbors,
the plants they would see, daily, between their doors and the
wild.
Which, of course, is just what an introduction should do.
Take you out your door, and help you start seeing what is there.
And that is what Lauren did: she wrote a book about the com-
mon landscape and put the right plants in it and got the details
[ ix