Golden Grasslands
The brown season is here: grasses are brittle, sun-parched, crisp as cornstalks. It’s the time of year when, in preparation for winter, farmers and municipalities raze fields flush with the dirt. But if you wander far enough and look closely enough, you can find rebellious patches of grasses that have escaped the blade. These remnant wild patches are gems: fragrant, delicate, photogenic. Havens for butterflies, beetles, bunnies, birds.
According to the Native Plant Revegetation Guide for Colorado, a terrific guide prepared by the Colorado Natural Areas Program, I live in Colorado’s Eastern Plains and Foothills Region. This region is dominated by grasslands that (excluding areas disturbed by humans) blanket the eastern half of Colorado and spill across state lines into Kansas, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Nebraska. Vast stretches of rolling topography, too far west and far too dry to support tallgrass growth but sufficiently watered to sustain stands of shortgrass. And thus, the swatches of grass I seek out during my evening walks are the proud remains of the far-western fringe of the Great Plains.
Like the trees I wander amongst on my mountain hikes, the grasses I encounter during my daily strolls are strangers to me. I am unable to match names with what I see. And so there is work to do, a starter list of species to compile, field guides to study, identification tips to absorb. Some light research gets me started.
I discover that, in my area, I might find nearly a dozen species of short graminoids (that’s just a fancy name for grass-like plants). Lovely specimens such as blue grama, hairy grama, buffalograss, galleta, threadleaf sedge, junegrass, ring muhly, Sandberg bluegrass, sand dropseed, needle-and-thread grass, western wheatgrass.
And there is a chance too of stumbling upon a few of the mid-height grass species—breeds too tall to be shortgrasses and too short to be tallgrasses: little bluestem, green needlegrass, sideoats grama.
I’m amazed at the diversity in the rolling grasslands around me and puzzled at why humans insist on mowing them down and plowing them over with no appreciation for their beauty, ecological value, and sheer pluck.
