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Updated: May 24, 2025
The second is also quite slender, growing in tufts two feet high by one wide, with culms often somewhat curving, which, as the spikes go out of bloom, have a whitish fuzzy look. These two are prevailing grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and hill-sides. The culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple tinge, and help to declare the ripeness of the year.
The species selected was not the most graceful of its family; the stems, or culms, being densely crowded, erect, as thick at the base as the arm, copiously branching, and very feathery throughout their whole length of sixty feet.
Perhaps I have the more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer, and occupy sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did not suggest. Only the August sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves.
They act best when each branch seizes a few thin stems, like the culms of a grass, which they afterwards draw together into a solid bundle by the spiral contraction of all the branches.
The purple of their culms also excites me like that of the Poke-Weed stems. Think what refuge there is for one, before August is over, from college commencements and society that isolates! I can skulk amid the tufts of Purple Wood-Grass on the borders of the "Great Fields."
Notwithstanding its valuable properties, our travellers hated the sight of it; and more than once the Irishman, as he placed his axe upon the silicious culms, was heard to speak disrespectfully about it, "weeshin' that there wasn't a stalk of the cane in all Burnayo." But another kind of obstruction vexed Murtagh even more than the brakes of bamboo.
We shall see tall flags like Saracen spears, and the dark green culms of gigantic rushes, and the golden arundinaria the bamboo, and "cana brava," that rival the forest trees in height. Many a form of animal life we may behold. Basking in the sun, we may behold the yellow and spotted body of the jaguar a beautiful but dreaded sight.
Their tops swayed to and fro, and their hollow culms rattled against each other, as they were jerked about, and borne downward. Some living thing was pressing through their midst. The motion reached their verge the last canes gave way, and I now saw what I had looked for the spotted body of a hound!
It yielded the largest culms of the whole collection and bore long and heavy kernels with a red streak on the concave side and it excelled all other sorts by the fine qualities of its very white meal. In the unequal length of its stalks it has however a drawback, as the field appears thinner and more meager than it is in reality.
This well-known fact is not due, as some suppose, to the life of the species being of such a duration, but to favourable circumstances in the season. The Pao attains a height of 40 to 60 feet, and the culms average in thickness the human thigh; it is used for large water-vessels, and its leaves form admirable thatch, in universal use for European houses at Dorjiling.
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