I have been really enjoying the blog and photographs of the noticing project for about the last month . Carrying a camera with me everywhere has made me very observant of the world around me and lately what I have been noticing is grasses, sedges and rushes. What makes them so noticeable at this time of year in Ontario is that most of them are flowering . You can find them in your lawn and garden but most of the more interesting varieties are found along the roadsides, paths, forests, meadows and wetlands.
The other day I gathered as many different grasses and sedges that I could find behind my office at lunch time and made a small but very beautiful bouquet for the porch. Edgar really liked the way it smelled.
I looked at the basic classification system for these flowering plants and tried to separate them into grasses and sedges. I didn't bring home any sample of rushes because the wetland behind my office is a protected wildlife area.
Grasses are the Poaceae and sedges are Cyperaceae. So you see there are many more varieties of grasses than sedges. Here are the grasses I found.
I think I found about 16 different types. The number of sedges were only 5.
I am going to let you in on a secret easy way of telling a grass from a sedge. Sedges have edges. Grasses are conical without edges on the shafts. This end on view of the sedge group shows what I mean.
I hope that this will make you notice more of the fantastic green world growing all around you.