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