Dr M says: Your patience is rewarded and here at last is Part the Second of Dr M’s long-awaited Poaceae quiz!
Grasses, so the Poaceae song goes, and as Dr M’s students on University of Reading MSc Plant Diversity know well, have “flowers reduced to spikelets strange yet magical”.
The grass spikelet is indeed a wondrous thing and has an intrinsic beauty and fascination and the size, shape and structure is an important feature in grass ID.
Grass spikelets are very photogenic, assuming you have a camera with a decent macro lens.
But the whole grass plant, that’s a different matter, and it’s certainly not so easy to capture grasses in the field, at least if you want to get the level of detail required for reliable ID.
And so, with some help from Agrostological friends and colleagues, Dr M has put together this gallery of thirty-six images, these are grasses fearlessly captured wild in the field and present views such as you might see in the field a few paces away.
Dr M says: These three dozen grasses should be identifiable, certainly to genus and in many case also to species, from the images even if you would need to be much closer and armed with your hand lens and with a decent spikelet dissection to be certain!
Dr M advises: Be not Poaceously fearful! Check out the images (click on them twice for more detail) and see how many you can recognise.
Answers – and links to Poaceous resources for images and ID tips – coming in time for the weekend!
-
- 01
-
- 02
-
- 03
-
- 04
-
- 05
-
- 06
-
- 07
-
- 08
-
- 09
-
- 10
-
- 11
-
- 12
-
- 13
-
- 14
-
- 15
-
- 16
-
- 17
-
- 18
-
- 19
-
- 20
-
- 21
-
- 22
-
- 23
-
- 24
-
- 25
-
- 26
-
- 27
-
- 28
-
- 29
-
- 30
-
- 31
-
- 32
-
- 33
-
- 34
-
- 35
-
- 36
Image credits include:
Alastair Culham, BSBI, Floral Images, Geoffrey Hall, Peter Gateley, Steven Heathcote
Dr M says: Finished the quiz? Check the answers here!
August 5, 2015
