Grasses deserve a second look

Most of us learn our wildflowers by their flowers and then quietly give up on grasses. It's understandable: around 160 native and naturalised grass species grow in Britain, many of them green, narrow-leaved and maddeningly similar at a glance. But a meadow in June is mostly grass, and a wetland edge — the damp flush, the fen margin, the riverside hay meadow — is even more so. Learn a dozen common species and you'll suddenly be able to read the ground you're walking on.

The trick is to stop staring at the whole plant and start looking at three things instead: the leaf blade, the small structure where the blade meets the stem called the ligule, and — later in the season — the seed head. You don't need to identify everything. You need to recognise the plants you'll meet over and over again.

Kit and timing

• A x10 hand lens. Grasses are small; your eyes are not.
• A penknife or a sturdy thumbnail for peeling leaves back.
• A notebook. Date, place, habitat, and what the plant was doing.
• Wellingtons, if you're heading for wet meadows. You will be heading for wet meadows.

Go early in the season to learn leaves, when the meadow is knee-high and nothing has flowered yet. Come back in June and July for seed heads. Visit the same spot in late summer to see what the stems and stubble tell you. A single visit rarely settles an identification.

Start with the leaf blade

Look first at the general look of the leaf. Is it bright green and glossy, grey-green and softly hairy, or dark and blue-tinged? Run a blade between finger and thumb: is it smooth and ribbed along its length, or velvety? Is it limp, or stiff enough to stand up to the wind?

Then check the tip. A pointed, tapering tip suggests a fescue or a brome. A blunt tip shaped like the prow of a little boat is the giveaway of annual meadow-grass, whose leaf is also faintly wrinkled across its width — the grass of every pavement crack and every poached gateway in the country.

Turn a leaf over and look at the underside. Perennial ryegrass has a shining, varnished underside that catches the light. Finally, look at the base of the plant. Clumps that form dense tussocks with broad, coarse, blue-green leaves usually mean cocksfoot. Stems with swollen, bulb-like bases pointing to timothy.

The ligule: your most useful feature

This is where a beginner becomes a botanist. Where the blade peels away from the sheath that wraps the stem, there is a small flap of tissue — the ligule. Peel a leaf gently downwards and look at the junction with your lens. It takes a moment, then it becomes second nature.

• Long, white, papery membrane: timothy, with a ligule up to about 5mm, and cocksfoot, whose ligule is long and ragged at the top edge.
• Short, blunt membrane: perennial ryegrass and the meadow-grasses, often only 1–2mm and easy to miss.
• A fringe of hairs, or hairs at the sides only: typical of the fine-leaved fescues and some bents.

While you're there, look for auricles — small claw-like lobes clasping the stem at the same junction. Perennial ryegrass has them; most meadow grasses don't. Combined, ligule and auricles will sort a large part of your meadow.

Reading the seed heads

Seed heads are easier, but they're seasonal. Sweet vernal grass flowers first, sometimes in April, and gives itself away by smell: cut or warm a stem and it releases a rich coumarin scent of new-mown hay. Meadow foxtail follows, its cylindrical head soft and grey-purple. Cocksfoot arrives in June with stiff, one-sided clusters gathered into a knobbly head, and crested dog's-tail offers a neat, comb-like spike. Yorkshire fog's panicle is soft, pinkish-white and fuzzy to touch — the whole plant is velvety, which is why children call it soft grass.

Get into the habit of asking whether the head is a spike (a single unbranched stem of spikelets, as in timothy), a one-sided cluster (cocksfoot, dog's-tail), or a loose, branching panicle (most brome grasses and fescues). That one question narrows the field enormously.

Where meadow meets marsh

Wetter ground adds sedges and rushes to the mix, and beginners often mistake all three for one another. The old rhyme still works: sedges have edges — triangular stems you can feel — rushes are round and solid, and grasses have joints, hollow round stems, and swollen nodes you can slide a finger along. Purple moor-grass is a genuine grass of wet, acid ground, with a tussocky base and purple-tinged panicles that catch the autumn light across a fen. Reed canary-grass and reed sweet-grass line ditches and damp hollows, and their pale, broad heads in late summer are often the first clue that the water table is higher here than in the field next door.

Taken together, these plants are how a wet meadow tells its own story. Read them carefully and the ground beneath your boots begins to explain itself.

Habits that make it stick

Choose one grass per walk and learn it properly. Check the same plant again in a fortnight and note how it has changed. Record the date every time, because flowering times are the thread that stitches a year of meadow visits together, and they shift from county to county. Don't chase rarities until the common ones are old friends — cocksfoot, timothy, ryegrass, Yorkshire fog and annual meadow-grass will carry you through most of the summer.

After a season of deliberate looking, something shifts. You stop seeing a green blur and start seeing a community: who flowers early, who tolerates trampling, who prefers the damp corner by the ditch. That's the reward, and it's waiting in almost any meadow you can reach on a Saturday morning.