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The Festuca Dometorum, fescue grass of the bushes, produces bulbs from the sheaths of its straw. The Allium Magicum, or magical onion, produces onions on its head, instead of seeds. The Polygonum Viviparum, viviparous bistort, rises about a foot high, with a beautiful spike of flowers, which are succeeded by buds or bulbs, which fall off and take root.
Among the grasses found on cultivated lands in this country, the following are considered as among the most valuable for ordinary farm cultivation; some of them being adapted to pastures, and others almost exclusively to mowing and the hay-crop: Timothy, Meadow Foxtail, June or Kentucky Blue Grass, Fowl Meadow, Rough-stalked Meadow, Orchard Grass, Perennial Rye Grass, Italian Rye Grass, Redtop, English Bent, Meadow Fescue, Tall Oat Grass, Sweet-scented Vernal, Hungarian Grass, Red Clover, White or Dutch Clover, and some others.
What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only escaped the ferula to come under the fescue of an Imprimatur; if serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no more than the theme of a grammar-lad under his pedagogue, must not be uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporizing and extemporizing licenser?
Indeed I could scarcely bear to use the Ferula to them, or nip 'em with a Fescue, much less to untruss and Scourge 'em, as 'tis the brutal fashion of Pedants to do; nor do I think, though I disobeyed Solomon's maxim, and Spared the Rod, that I did much towards Spoiling any Child that was under my care. But Schoolkeeping is a tiresome trade.
Tall wild rice and wild rye grow on the flood-plain and by the streams where the tall buttercups shine like bits of gold and the blackbirds have their home; bushy blue stem on the prairies and in the open woods where the golden squaw weed and the wild geranium make charming patterns of yellow and pink and purple and some of the painted cup left over from May still glows like spots of scarlet rain; tall grama grass on the dry prairies and gravelly knolls, whitened by the small spurge and yellowed by the creeping cinquefoil; nodding fescue in the sterile soils where the robin's plantain and the sheep sorrel have succeeded the early everlasting; satin grasses in the moist soil of the open woodlands where the fine white flowers of the Canada anemone blow, and slough grass in the marshy meadows where the white-crossed flowers of the sharp spring are fading, and the woolly stem of the bitter boneset is lengthening; reed grass and floating manna grass in the swamps where the broad arrow leaves of the sagittaria fringe the shore and the floating leaves and fragrant blossoms of the water lilies adorn the pond.
I stretched myself prone on a velvety carpet of moss, and gave myself up to a profound investigation of the one square foot of ground which lay beneath my eyes. The number of blades of grass was prodigious. A few, already awned, stood above their fellows, waving like palms-meadowgrass, fescue, foxtail, brome-grass each slender stalk crowned with a tuft.
The little Dominican disappeared with the loads of stones. I regret him: he would have been a charming neighbor. The eyed lizard I do not regret at all. The sand sheltered a different colony. This burrow is a vertical well, with a curb of fescue grass intertwined with silk. You can see the eyes of the mighty Spider gleam at the bottom of the den like little diamonds, an object of terror to most.
Then under foot there were patches of woolly feather-grass and fragrant meadow-sweet, sheets of fescue, dog's-tail, creeping-bent, and meadow grass. Sainfoin reared its long fine filaments; clover unfurled its clear green leaves, plantains brandished forests of spears, lucerne spread out in soft beds of green satin broidered with purple flowers.
ENGLISH BENT, known also by a number of other names, is largely cultivated in some sections. It closely resembles redtop, but may be distinguished from it by the roughness of the sheaths when the hand is drawn from above downward. It possesses about the same qualities as redtop. MEADOW FESCUE is one of the most common of the fescue grasses, and is said to be the Randall grass of Virginia.
My way is ever to point out to the curious, different tracts of investigation, to come at the first springs of the events I tell; not with a pedantic Fescue, or in the decisive manner or Tacitus, who outwits himself and his reader; but with the officious humility of a heart devoted to the assistance merely of the inquisitive; to them I write, and by them I shall be read, if any such reading as this could be supposed to hold out so long, to the very end of the world.
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