Update: on that pink and green grass

I went out to Oyster Bay again today, and went to look at the grass I wrote about last Friday.

Poa bulbosa. As posted. Photo taken one week ago.

Now, a week after the last visit, the grass is springing up everywhere. Mostly not in clumps, like this one was, but singly. It's unobtrusive on its own; just another feathery layer on the ground.A few of them were pink and green, but most were brownish already.

The clump I photographed last week has turned completely brown. No wonder I've missed the green stage before!

Pink and green grass

At the foot of an old hawthorn tree beside the path at Oyster Bay, I found a patch of a grass I hadn't seen (or maybe noticed) before. An unusual grass; for a while I wasn't even sure that it was grass, but the flowering heads were grass-like. The clump was about 6 inches tall, and dense.

It almost looks like an evergreen tree, sort of. Except for those seed heads.

A single stalk, picked and hand-held. Background colour: the mud flats of Oyster Bay.

It wasn't in my books. Nor in the grass photos Google chose for me. I turned to E-Flora BC. They have 289 species in the local Poaceae, the grass family, most with small thumbnails. Down near the bottom of the list, I found it: Bulbous bluegrass, Poa bulbosa ssp vivipara.

And now, looking at all the photos on E-Flora, I realize that I probably have seen it before. Many times. Photos taken in early May are pink and green; photos taken in June show taller plants, brown and dark brown. I've seen those, but wasn't paying enough attention.

E-Flora's info says that the flowers are yellow. They aren't visible; grass flowers grow inside an inner bract, inside an outer bract, protected by two more outer bracts. The red colour here is of all those bracts.

It's an imported grass, from Eurasia, common now in BC.