Discovering where I'm at
Anthony at Z1NZ0L1N is hosting the IndieWeb Blog Carnival with Where you at? and it's absolutely fascinating. I love this, I could write a hundred different things about it.
Where you at? is a twenty question test on 'basic environmental perception of place'. I got eleven: A fairly firm grasp of the obvious.
I wanted to think about why I got that score. It comes from my interest in local history, gardening, and the influence of my grandfather on my family. He was very outdoorsy and knowledgeable about nature, and we all benefit from that still. I owe him an enormous debt and I think about that a lot. Were my interests a little different, my result would be very different.
Why don't I know what I don't know? Some of it I don't really need to know so I've never learnt. But I might need to learn - wildfires are going to become more and more of a problem. Some is more scientific than I've ever been - I don't even know what a soil series is, what that actually means. Never mind what my local one is. And apparently I was never curious enough to wonder about rainfall beyond 'not' or 'a lot'.
I'm dismayed I don't know the answer to 13: 'Name five grasses in your area. Are any of them native?' I knew I didn't know because my niece has asked me before. So I decided to find out.
The Woodland Trust doesn't have many grasses but the descriptions of the ones it does have are very nice. The most niche and technical is the Botanical Society. I've used The Wildlife Trust and their links below.
I know couch grass because it's the strong bugger that busts through all the cardboard and whatever I put on my garden beds trying to stop it. The roots are long and tough. So that's like hate-identifying. Also cotton-grass but it's so obvious it feels like cheating.
What I'd just call 'grass-grass' is actually called annual meadow-grass. The fluffy clouds are Yorkshire fog. That's such a good, evocative name I really ought to remember it. Perennial rye-grass is the one that's fun to peel the seeds out of, Soft brome is the hairy twin, and False oat-grass is its droopy cousin.
The spiky-headed ones are Timothy. The brown tufty one is Field wood-rush. Wood equals brown, maybe? Creeping bent is fluffy and Cock's foot doesn't look much like any sort of cock or foot - I think of them as little bells.
That's eleven grasses in total! All of which I've seen in my garden, on the field, in parks, and so on. There are more on the websites, rarer ones. The slight problem is this mostly refers to the flowers and/or seeds. So if they are just leaves I'm in trouble. I'm going to make myself a little crib sheet so I can practice identifying them.
I'll continue investigating the questions I don't know because I love this, I love feeling this connection to the world.