Grass is good, grass is great

(I have received several remarks saying that the usual bullet point format of these posts throws people off a bit. My goal with this blog is to bring you all fascinating information about plants in the clearest of ways, so if the format is what’s bogging people down, I’m more than willing to make a change. Botany thoughts is not a static entity and constructive criticism is always welcome. Let me know what you think and we can work together to make this a great place for learning!)

Would you believe it if I told you that the grass on your lawn has flowers? Probably not, because you’ve never seen them.

Let’s start at the beginning here. Grasses are monocots and angiosperms, meaning that they can be easily identified by their parallel venation and they do indeed flower. They all belong to the family Poaceae, which includes things like corn, barley, bamboo, and yes, your beloved turf grass. It might seem like corn and bamboo are entirely separate, like corn is only grown in the midwestern United States and that bamboo is only found in China, but they are actually quite closely related.

They are also closely related to 12,000 other plant species. Poaceae is the fifth largest family of plants and members of this family compose about 20% of the vegetation on this planet. This makes them the most widespread plant type. It is apparent that grasses play an important role in prairie grasslands, but they are also significant members of rainforest, desert, wetland, and tundra habitats. They’re an important source of food and energy for a wide variety of organisms, even humans. See that bread holding your sandwich together? You can thank Poaceae for that.

And how do these important plant friends of ours reproduce? With flowers of course! Grass flowers are usually arranged in what are called spikelets, and every spikelet is made up of one or more floret. Florets are composed of the flower itself and two protective bracts, or leaves. The floret is wrapped in a palea and then another external layer called a lemma. That’s a lot of terminology, but the point is grasses have flowers and those flowers are as legitimate and complicated as any other angiosperm. But grasses don’t like to show off. Most are wind pollinated and their flowers are very discrete.

Even the little grasses that grow in your yard are doing interesting things every day. They don’t even mind if you mow them. Grasses have evolved to grow from their base rather from their elongated stem tips in response to herbivore pressures. It allows them to keep on keeping on even if you lop off the tops of them with a lawn mower or a hungry cow.

Source

Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2016. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae?oldformat=true>.