Koeleria macrantha - Crested Hair-grass - and Langcliffe limestone wildflowers growing with it

There are two parts to this post.

1. The more  serious "How to identify it"  part to fit in with my series on grasses in this blog.

2. The chatty bit (lower down)  about finding it in flowering at Plantlife's Reserve Winskill Stones, above Langcliffe, and the flowers that grow with it.

Crested Hair-grass is a grass most beginner botanists have not heard of, because there are big parts of Britain where it does not grow.

It is a beautiful small grass of low nutrient limestone and chalk pastures, and  base rich sandy areas by the sea.  It grows  where we can often find other delightful lime-loving flowers. It can grow in some old meadows on base rich soil. 

It is unlikely to occur in places that most people walk over most of the time: city streets - heavily fertilised meadows, in playing fields or lawns (unless your lawn happens to be on very thin chalk or limestone soil), in wetlands  or bogs or woodland. And it is so very small, so people just do not see it.

It is one of the indicator species of old grassland I had to look out for when surveying grassland for the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Without flowers it is quite hard to identify - until you notice the tiny hairs that line the edge of the leaf blades and the tops of the ridges on the upper surface if the of the tiny (2mm wide, 3cm long) blades of grass. 

When I was at the Field Studies Council's Malham Tarn Field Centre  teaching A level Ecology weeks we compared the vegetation on different types of grassland and looked at different ways of measuring species abundance. For example we compared plants on rendzinas (shallow limestone soil) and brown earths (deeper soil but still not too acid) 

Some of you might know Red Fescue (Festuca rubra) and Common Bent (Agrostis capillaris). For the tiny grasses in the turf I used to say "If it has needle-like leaf blades, call it Festuca rubra; If it has flat leaf blades call it Agrostis capillaris. Agrostis leaves do have ribs, but they are very fine ribs: Festuca rubra at the base have needle-like leaves,  but when its shoots start to flower they produce wider leaves with about 5 to 7 to 9 ribs.

Koerleia is about half way between this.

BUT  IT  HAS  HAIRS  ON  THE RIBS  ON  THE  BLADES when looked at with a hand lens.

 Its inflorescences are quite distinctive- Slightly silvery; they can be compact most of the time like a lombardy poplar, but sometimes the inflorescence branches spread out - when the weather is conducive for the florets to shed their pollen.

The inflorescence has a hairy stem. The only other common grass with a hairy stem is Yorkshire Fog.

25 June 2026 - at Winskill Stones Plantlife Reserve but probably been flowering for a week or two.

The slope opposite the Quarry cutting Car Park at Plantlife's Winskill Stone Reserve is a good place to see Crested Hair-grass

Note this year you can see that the "Landscape Picture Ash tree"
has really been affected by Ash die-back

Koeleria macrantha 20 June 2024  limestone pasture slope in Lower Winskill Farm

Small Heath butterfly on Koeleria macrantha,  on YWT's Southerscales reserve

And here are a few plants growing with it: 

Thyme.

This is Thyme-leaved Sandwort - it is extremely tiny.

Salad Burnet close-up - each flower has four green sepals and at the end of the style is the tassel of red stigmas.

Bird's-foot Trefoil

For my records, the reason I went up to Winskill Stones on 25 June was look look for Wavy Hair-grass and Nardus stricta  which used to grow in a tiny area with deeper soil not far from the road 25 -20 years ago - I used to show it to people who came on grasses courses I ran at Lower Winskill Farm. Sadly these two species do not seem to be there any more.  

This is no great crisis for nature conservation - just an interesting fact, and it means I will have to walk or drive further to look for these acid-loving plants. For some reason the soil had remained more acid there, left over from the days when the area had had different management. It was the only place on the reserve where I had found these two species. It may even be a consequence of the rain having a lot of sulphur dioxide in it up till about 30 years ago.

Well I shall just have to go elsewhere in Langcliffe Parish and record it these two species in July

Wildflower walks round Settle from Covid onwards..

Grasses - index to posts about different species of grass on this site