Grasses, sedges, rushes : an identification guide PDF
Preview Grasses, sedges, rushes : an identification guide
Grasses, Sedges, Rushes Grasses, An Identification Guide Sedges, Lauren Brown and Ted Elliman Original drawings by Lauren Brown Foreword by Jerry Jenkins Rushes New Haven and London Published with support from The Helen Printed in China. Clay Frick Foundation and from Peter and Sofia Blanchard. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949034 Published with assistance from the ISBN 978- 0- 300- 23677- 4 foundation established in memory of (paperback—flexibound : alk. paper) Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2020 by Lauren Brown This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/ and Ted Elliman. NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). All rights reserved. Original line drawings © 1979, 2020 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 by Lauren Brown. Drawing on page i: switch panicgrass Panicum virgatum An earlier version of this book was ( ), Lauren Brown. Grasses: An Identification Guide Avena sativa published as Photo on frontispiece: oat ( ), in 1979 by Houghton Mifflin Company. H. Zell/Wikimedia Commons. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e- mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Utopia, Meta, and Bunday Sans type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. To John and Charlotte LB To Alice, with love TE This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword by Jerry Jenkins / ix Preface / xi Acknowledgments / xiii Introduction / 1 The American Prairie: Ecology and History / 7 How to Use This Book / 17 Glossary / 19 Identification Key / 23 Species Descriptions and Illustrations / 31 Some Identification Aids / 215 A Word on Rare and Invasive Species / 221 If You Do Not Find Something in This Book / 223 Credits / 237 Index / 243 This page intentionally left blank Foreword Grasses Lauren Brown’s appeared in 1979. It was a small beauty: 240 pages, about 125 grasses and sedges, a dozen other plants that looked grasslike, all organized by the way the plants looked in the field. Lovely pen- and- ink drawings, calligraphic head- ings, simple, focused prose. It made friends quickly, treated them well, and has kept them for forty years. To keep them, it had to solve a fundamental problem. To cover grasses and sedges well takes space; they don’t reduce to small drawings and field marks like birds. Also, there are a lot of them—sixteen hundred in the United States, several hundred in the Northeast. So a grass-a nd- sedge guide must be either big and complicated or small and incomplete. If big, it scares the beginners. If small and simple, it leaves out common plants and frustrates users. Going small sounds easier, but it isn’t. Knowing what to put in and what to leave out is hard. Everything, or almost every- thing, that readers are likely to see must go in, or they won’t trust the book. All the things they won’t see, or won’t see at first, must be left out, or they will get bogged down. Doing this requires visualizing, in detail, where readers may go and what they will see. Very few people have that sort of knowledge. Lauren does. Her solution was to realize that the agricul- tural and post- agricultural countryside of the Northeast is, in effect, a biome to itself. As long as her readers stayed within it, they would only see around a hundred of the grasses and sedges, a manageable number. By restricting herself to this countryside—I call it the common landscape—she could cover the species her readers would see every day. Not, certainly, the plants of the wild and special places. But rather the neighbors, the plants they would see, daily, between their doors and the wild. Which, of course, is just what an introduction should do. Take you out your door, and help you start seeing what is there. And that is what Lauren did: she wrote a book about the com- mon landscape and put the right plants in it and got the details [ ix
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