Agrostis capillaris - Common Bent

Common Bent  Agrostis capillaris

Grass of the Month - August

1: January - Reed Canary Grass - Phalaris arundinacea 

2: February - The Common Reed - Phragmites australis 

3: March - Blue Moor-grass - Sesleria caerulea 

4: April - Sweet Vernal Grass - Anthoxanthum odoratum

5: May - Meadow Foxtail - Alopecurus pratensis 

6: June - Quaking Grass - Briza media  

7: July- Timothy Grass - Phleum pratense 

8: August - Common Bent - Agrostis capillaris

I chose to put Common Bent in August because it does not start to flower until well into July, so it fully out by August. Patches of ground that just have Common Bent can stand out in early summer - May, June and early July - because they are green and flowerless then, compared to surrounding areas with other grass flowers.

And where do you find Common Bent?

Common Bent ( Agrostis capillaris ) – small, delicate and inconspicuous - is one of the commonest grasses. Remember running barefoot on the garden lawn as a child? You were probably running on Common Bent, along with needle-leaved Red Fescue. It grows in nutrient poor lawns, acid grassland pastures, sandy soils and in heather moorland.

Heath Bedstraw, Tormentil,  Betony, and Bitter Vetchling are some of the prettier wildflowers that can be found on more interesting Common Bent grassland

Up at Winskill which is on limestone rock, Common Bent is only a very minor component of the limestone grassland, but it is the major plant in the hollows that are filled with loess (soil made from dust blown up from surrounding areas at the end of the last ice age)  - see below

The light green area with no purple Knapweed is an area with little else except Common Bent - this is where loess is deposited

Its inflorescence is like a spreading Christmas tree with many hundreds of tiny spikelets – tiny because each spikelet contains only one flower. Bents ( Agrostis ) have only one flower per spikelet, Meadow grasses ( Poas ) have several flowers per spikelet

The plants are small and so nondescript – no hairs, no big leaves, no stolons. The emerging leaf is rolled and hairless, and the short narrow 2mm-wide blades come away from the sheath at a wide angle. The ligule is very short. It grows in little tufts and these are linked by rhizomes, but you can't see these as they are underground.

Common Bent becomes much more exciting on metal ore spoil heaps such as at Pikedaw above Malham, where it is one of the very few higher plants that can tolerate the metal pollution. Since nothing much else will grow, a delightful pattern of small tufts arranged within bigger patches can be seen.

Bentham is a small  town ten miles from Settle.

Could Bentham mean land of Common Bent?

The word Bentham ( Benetain in the Doomsday book) comes from the word meaning rough grass or reeds.

So I like to think it could refer to Common Bent. However other grasses were once called bent – including. Purple Moor ( Molinia caerulea ) once known as White Bent which grows in abundance in white sheets on damp parts of Newby Moor and the moor south of Bentham.

I hope you found this useful - Why not come on a Grass Identification course? And have fun learning about grasses with other people. J.A.

Eco-Congregation Award for Bradford Cathedral

This afternoon I am going to go to Bradford to see the Cathedral being presented with the Eco-Congregation Award, at 4pm

(And here, inserted later, is the picture I took of the presentation of the Award - with a demonstration solar panel in the background, and the east window of the cathedral  beyond that. It shows the Dean on the right)

Well done Bradford Cathedral! I will find out what things they have done to receive the award.

I will also email my friends in Churches together in Settle and District. It may encourage people here to do something.

At the Cathedral they are also going to have a talk/consultation about solar panels.

I will be interested to hear that.

Some people say that the real "pay back" time for solar photovoltaic  panels is so long   that we would be better off using our money for other things - (saving wildlife habitats, I of course suggest). But with the current government scheme, the payback time will only be about 15 years, after which the panels will be making money through selling electricity to the grid.

Ethical Consumer, quoting the Centre for Alternative Technology say:

A PV system mounted in the UK will probably have produced between 3 and 7 times as much energy as was required for its production

A fully installed grid-connected domestic PV system is likely to cost from £4000 to £8000 per KW rated capacity.. So a typical 2.5kW PV roof will cost around £15000.

Although the Feed in Tariffs (FiTs) are guaranteed for 25 years,The window of opportunity for the top FiTs - is due to end in less than 20 months, in March 2012. Most people are in danger of missing the boat again. You can only sign up for a FiT if the company you use to install them are approved by the government's Microgeneration Certification Scheme. therefore you can't claim it for a DIY scheme.

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Coffee Morning Results and Card Sales

We made £105-40 at the Coffee morning on 3rd April, including sale of cards. The church has a regular Tuesday morning Coffee Morning but on the first Tuesday of the month the proceeds are given to charity - this August it was for the Rainforest Fund

A big thank you to all who supported it. Several extra people came as a result of my local publicity. A big thank you to Lesley and others for making the scones and cakes.

The coffee morning spurred me on to make lots more cards - since then over the next three ordinary coffee mornings the card display has stayed up and we have sold another £20-00 worth of cards.

I sold cards when I was up at Malham Tarn Field Centre - £18 combined - from the Malham Tarn staff, From the Grasses and Sedges course and from the Acrylic painting course. Then I went up to give a talk on "Flowers of the Settle Carlisle line" to the "Settle Carlisle Line Course", and the tutor on that gave £10-00 for cards.

Thank you

Every bit helps!

Phleum pratense - Timothy-grass

Timothy grass  Phleum pratense

Grass of the Month - July 2010

More grasses at:
http://rainforest-save.blogspot.co.uk/p/grasses.html

Recent (2026) Extra notes on Phleum pratense added at the end:

(a) why is Timothy grass called Timothy Grass

Phleum pratense growing in the thicker soil in the hollow below the limestone slope near the gate at Lower Winskill.

A grass with a spike-like panicle - is it Timothy or is it Meadow Foxtail?

Look at a spikelet.

Foxtail has one fine awn (long hair) per spikelet. Timothy has symmetrical spikelets with two "horns" - The glumes have points and look like "horns" of a devil. 

Phleum does not flower until July, so before July a plant with a spikelike panicle is likely to be Meadow Foxtail

By August nearly all the Meadow Foxtail flowers have fallen off their stem,  or at least are looking very dead.

But how do you separate the shoots vegetatively? - First you can look at May's grass- Meadow foxtail for a good chart comparison

The easiest way is that Timothy is famous for its swollen shoot base, looking something slightly-like an onion.


The picture on the right of a young plant formerly growing by a trampled bridle track shows a not very good onion shoot-base. 

It also shows how the blades can spiral on their own axes, and that the blades are shortish, can stick out at right angles (but later in the year they actually grow upright). 

It shows the blades can be a bluish whitish version of green. It shows that the old basal shoots are a pale fawnish colour (i.e. not dark red or dark brown as sometimes the case in Alopecurus, and not bright yellowy chestnut brown as can occur in Briza)  

But what if you don't want to uproot the plant? In June this year I was surveying some permanent plots in an experiment  in a hay meadow at Colt Park. - One cannot go round digging up plants! I could distinguish both Alopecurus and Phleum  from the other flowerless grasses as they are  larger than other grasses there in the "newest leaf rolled and leaves hairless" category.

This is what I found:-

Look at the back of the base of the blades, at the collar area ( the white line at the base of the blade which has the meristematic (growing) tissue.  Timothy had a wider collar than Meadow Foxtail. Timothy also has a long ligule that is about as long as it is wide. Meadow foxtail has a very short ligule.

Imagine the grass was the other way up so that from the back, the collar area looks like a man's shoulders.

Meadow Foxtail looks like hunched, rounded shoulders.

Timothy's shoulders are held back, as if the person is very proud and confident, or has a coat hanger across his shoulders inside his jacket.

Now if you see me slouching and then suddenly sit up straight, it is not because I am pretending to have a coat hanger across my shoulders - it is because I am pretending to be like Timothy grass.

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With a good handlens you can see the tiny teeth or  bristles on the edge of the blade of Timothy

If you hold a blade of Timothy to the light it has an  interesting pattern 

There is more I could add - but Hey, that is for another day.

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Timothyttt

  Timothy-name

History of Phleum pratense as "Timothy"



Added in Summer 2026;
A neighbour in June in nearby Stainforth asked on Facebook asked "Why is it called "Timothy" grass?
I researched

NOTE (June 2026- Historical fact - AI - ChatGpt and other systems have just become rapidly available - )

(Though it makes it difficult or laborious to credit sources)

 And AI can still often be wrong. (As I know from suggestions AI has made to me about identification of species  of lichens and plants. )

Anyway,

I researched.

and discovered it is not because a man called Timothy Hanson in America bred it, or because he introduced it in the USA .. He simply promoted it in America in about 1720. It is first recorded as being called "Herd's grass" in New England in about 1711.. 

In the 1600s in Europe people encouraged a variety of plants to grow in their meadows. I presume the combination of meadow plants had just arisen naturally derived from wood pasture.  Phleum pratense  was not prized as an agricultural grass then and probably didn't have a name.  

The plants in European manage pastures and meadows did not grow in America.  As Europeans began to colonise America, they brought their animals horses, cattle, sheep etc with them. Seeds from the hay they brought for the cattle would escape and start to grow.

Phleum pratense is first known to have been recorded as "Hard's Grass around 1711 in New England. That tells us it must have been growing there for some years beforehand.  

Timothy Hanson promoted it as an outstanding hay crop around 1720.  It was already established by then.  So it became known as Timothy Grass.

Seed was widely distributed throughout the American colonies. from 1755-1850 Seed was deliberately imported for hay and pasture (e.g. Cock's-foot) - but 

British farmers later imported seed from America, helping to popularise a grass that was already native to Britain but whose agricultural value had been demonstrated across the Atlantic.

Linnaeus on the other side of the Atlantic published the name Phleum pratense in 1753,

Scientists in Europe before Linnaeus had given species extremely long names made up of a description of their features. 

Caspar Bauhin (1560–1624) was a Swiss physician and botanist . He distinguished between  genus and species, he laid essential groundwork for the naming system later refined by Carl Linnaeus.

He called it Phleum pratense majus which literally means: "The larger meadow Phleum."

e.g. John Ray referred to it in his works.

Early herbalists made pictures of something like it, sometimes referring to it as Phleos (from a Greek word for grass), 

European settlement of America

1400–1492: No permanent European population on the North American mainland.

1492–1600: Explorers, fishermen and a few short-lived colonies; only tiny permanent populations.

1607 onward: Permanent English settlement begins at Jamestown, followed by rapid growth.

From 1600-1700 most of the seed introductions were accidental:-

Mixed with hay, straw, grain, and ship ballast.

Included timothy, perennial ryegrass, sweet vernal grass and probably Kentucky bluegrass.

More grasses at:
http://rainforest-save.blogspot.co.uk/p/grasses.html

Coffee Morning 3rd August 10am

Hurray! We have a Coffee Morning organised for the Rainforest Fund - It is this coming Tuesday on Augsut 3rd at 10 am in the church foyer.
All welcome
Come and enjoy the scones and cake.

Buy beautiful Greetings cards.

Buy the new 2011 calendars, ready to post as presents.

Invite your friends.

See you!!!


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Briza media - Quaking Grass

Quaking grass - Briza media

Grass of the Month - June

1: January - Reed Canary Grass - Phalaris arundinacea 

2: February - The Common Reed - Phragmites australis 
3: March - Blue Moor-grass Sesleria caerulea 

4: April - Sweet Vernal Grass - Anthoxanthum odoratum
5: May - Meadow Foxtail - Alopecurus pratensis 
6: June - Quaking Grass - Briza media

Is Quaking grass your favourite grass?

The beautiful hanging spikelets come out in mid June and dangle and wave in the wind. Their heart shaped lemmas become dark glossy brown and sparkle in the sun. It grows in a variety of habitats but often with other very special flowers:

• On limestone grassland with Rockrose and Ladies-mantle
• On chalk grassland with Orchids
• In calcareous flushes with Birds-eye Primrose
• In slightly acid flushes with Common Spotted-orchid
• In traditional species rich hay meadows with Wood Cranesbill or Meadow Cranesbill.
  
  It doesn't grow on your average lawn or ryegrass pasture/silage field

I took the picture above on 27 June 2010 at Winskill Stones Nature Reserve - see how brown and burned the grass is in the background on the shallow limestone soils with the drought. In the background are Ingleborough (left) and Pen y Ghent (right)

Here is a close-up from the picture.

It kept shaking in the wind so I put a piece next to a rock.  And now you see the rock is covered with lichen

It has many different local English names.

But how do you recognise it when it is not in flower?

With a group of a dozen students I give each student a different feature to remember:

1. They are small plants.
2. Small flat leaves.
3. Hairless
4. No auricles
5. Blades make an almost right angles with their sheaths. The shoot is erect.
6. Emerging leaf rolled
   
   The above features mean it looks like, and could be confused with other pasture grasses:-
   Common Bent, Sweet Vernal-grass, Crested Dog's-tail or even Small Cat's-tail
   
   So what is special? - Learn these tips to become an expert:-
   
7. It has slightly wider, whiter, fleshier leaves than most of the above (apart from Small Cat's-tail)
8. The blades spiral on their own axis (as does only Small Cat's-tail)
9. The blades often have crimson blotches or purple polo shaped marks.
10. They have yellow brown dead lower sheaths (as can Crested Dog's-tail)
11. They have rhizomes 1 cm long. Hence if you have one Briza shoot, look one cm away and you should find another. Dig one up (with landowner's permission of course) and look for the rhizome.
12. And the clinching fact? - the feature you could look for and ignore all the above?
    Hold a blade up to the light and look with a handlens:-
    
    You will see a striking regular pattern: (Say this:-)
    "Green, medium green;   green, dark green;  green, medium green;  green,white.    Green, medium green,  green, dark green,   green, medium green,  green,white.
    Green, medium green;   green, dark green;  green, medium green;  green,white.    Green, medium green,  green, dark green,   green, medium green,  green,white."
    etc.
    Common Bent, Crested Dog's-tail and Sweet Vernal-grass have just a simple pattern: dark, light, dark, light, dark, light, dark, light.
    
    Small Cat's-tail - and small versions of Timothy - (which have wide white fleshy leaves which spiral on their own axes) also have a fancy pattern with some much whiter veins. But they do not have the extremely regular pattern that Briza does. (And they have swollen bases to their shoots and no rhizomes and no yellow brown old sheaths)

I hope you found this useful - Why not come on a Grass Identification course? And have fun learning about grasses with other people. J.A

Environment Sunday 2010 -Settle Churches Together Walk to Winskill

Here is a slightly more detailed report of our trip:-

Environment Sunday 6 June 2010


Churches Together in Settle celebrated Environment Sunday by making a field trip to see local wildflowers.

But the group learned much more than wildflowers –

Botanist Dr Judith Allinson of St John’s Methodist Church, Settle took the group of 12 (from 5 different churches) to Lower Winskill Farm and met the farmer Mr Tom Lord, then they visited nearby places.

• Access for the disabled - They discovered and tried out  Mr Tom Lord’s newly built  brand new flat path to his haymeadow, wood, flower rich limestone pastures and viewpoint of the valley below, so that people with wheelchairs and restricted mobility could have access

• Beauty - They looked at a host of yellow flowers including: Yellow Rattle, three species of Buttercups, Silverweed, Bird’s-foot Trefoil, Lady’s-mantle, Rockrose, Cowslips,

• Fields Manged for Conservation interest – The group learned how the wealth of flowers in the pastures was due to the geology, past management and the way Mr Lord had be managing the land sympathetically over the past 20 years.

•  Ethical food -They ate British strawberries, British cream and Fairtrade chocolate shortbread biscuits and Fair Trade tea in an effort to eat “ethically”

•  Stupendous views - They had views of the Ribble valley, 100m below, up to Ingleborough 10 miles to the north and to beyond Settle in the south.
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•  Stimulating discussion- Mr Lord answered questions about farming. He pointed out that Upland farming was not “sustainable."  - At all.. Stunned silence. (This is an important point to people trying to be “green”.) The grants farmers get do not encourage them to save energy. – (Judith’s comment – “and there is me thinking ‘Isn’t it good that the grants that farmers get nowadays are often tied to some sort of conservation activity’ ”)

•  Rainforest Destruction - Indeed the grants enable farmers to keep more livestock indoors in winter, and this usually means greater reliance on imported animal foodstuffs which contains GM materials and palm oils (causing rainforest destruction).

• Change in energy usage -  In 1957 this farm did not have electricity. And the farmer would work from a horse and cart. – How things have changed with respect to energy consumption!

•   Change in pressure on farmers – where will this lead? - The Dales landscape is one of farms built as dairy farms in the Industrial Revolution and later, supplying cities such as Leeds. But now there are no dairy farms in the 10 miles of our valley to the north, and very few to the south. The farms have changed to beef cattle and sheep. “Most large dairies will not collect from small farms any more,” he said. “The dairy at Hawes making Wensleydale cheese being an exception”. We are losing a skills base. Farming is labour intensive – it is getting more difficult to find people with the necessary skills to do farming work. People who work building stone walls have to build an awful lot of stone walls before they can afford the expensive property around here.
He gave us food for thought.

“The policy makers need to do more thinking” he said. “But it is up to all of us to try and live more sustainable lives.”

• Settle Church’s contribution – to a new European book and to Nature Conservation - Whilst on the walk Judith showed the group a book that the European Christian Environment Network have just produced this June called “God‘s rich variety-Churches in Europe helping biodiversity”. She had downloaded from the internet that morning.

“Look at page 11” she said:

From North Yorkshire to Ghana / A look on food supply and climate change

Even North Yorkshire (GB) is affected by loss of species diversity. The biologist Judith Allinson has documented the loss of species and noted that one species has disappeared every two years for at least a hundred and fifty years. (…...)  The Methodist Church in Settle has started a species protection fund: with the money from this conservation groups can buy land and support a variety of projects to protect habitats worldwide under particular threat. For example some of this some of the money from Settle is invested in Ghana.
Protecting the diversity in our own back yard is important, but we need to remember the wider world.
Further information:
http://rainforest-save.blogspot.com
http://www.christian-ecology.org.uk

She thanked those members from her church at Settle who were supporting the project. “The European Christian Environment Network is meeting this week in Prague”. She said –“We must think of them. I have attended their conferences in the past as a representative of Christian Ecology Link”

After the visit to Lower Winskill the group continued to Yorkshire Wildlife Trust Reserve “Globe-flower Wood” where they saw a little wood packed with the golden orbs of the rare Globeflower, once more common. The fields to the left were yellow with buttercups and the fields on the right golden with Kingcup. “What is it about May and the beginning of June that produces so many yellow flowers?”  and “Isn’t it great that this little reserve has been protected”

Back in Settle Judith collected donations from people who came on the trip amounting to £20-00 to go to the Ghana project.  “Hmm – the Widow’s mite.. But every little each of us an each church can do helps.  Keep going!”

God's Rich Variety - European Churches booklet

An RSS feed from ECEN - European Christian Environment Network - told me about the 24 page A4 booklet about biodiversity work of individual churches in Europe.  It mentions our Rainforest-fund project and this blog . The booklet is at http://bit.ly/dbijPi - see page 11.

Here is a picture of us looking at the booklet on our Environment Sunday walk at Settle today. Several of these people help in fundraising for the Rainforest Fund Project.
After the walk people's donations contributed another £20-00 to our fund. Thank you!!

The text on page 11 says:-

From North Yorkshire to Ghana
Even North Yorkshire (GB) is affected by loss of species diversity.
The biologist Judith Allinson has documented the loss of species and noted that one species has disappeared every two years for at least a hundred and fifty years. In response to this the Methodist Church in Settle has started a  species protection fund: with the money from this conservation groups can buy land and support a variety of projects to protect habitats worldwide under particular threat. For example some of this some of the money from Settle is invested in Ghana.
Protecting the diversity in our own back yard is important,
but we need to remember the wider world.
Further information:
http://rainforest-save.blogspot.com
http://www.christian-ecology.org.uk

And if anyone from ECEN is reading this "Hi! - I am thinking of you meet this week in Prague"

Environment Sunday 2010 - 6 June Settle

The Sunday nearest to World Environment Day (5 June) is Environment Sunday - which is today 6 June. A group of 12 of us from Churches together in Settle (five different churches represented) made a visit to Lower Winskill Farm.

We examined the beautiful flowers of the limestone pastures. Then we had an interesting talk and discussion with the farmer, Mr Tom Lord