In what’s shaping up to be the driest year of my lifetime, I’ve been feeling particularly grateful for the flush of growth that still blankets my world during this short spring. What follows is an ode to grass.
Omnipresent backdrop to pretty much everywhere in California. Yellow stroke of a paintbrush across miles of undulating land that you zoom past doing 85 on their way through the foothills. Lawn, field, pasture. Nearly invisible in their ubiquity; more of a vague idea, than a specific entity. Always the stage, never the player. At least that’s the space Poaceae took up in my psyche when I lived in a city.
One of the great joys --and I mean this in all seriousness-- of the last five years of my life, has been getting to know grasses on their own terms. To see a monolith of two dimensional color, become a complex community of diverse individuals. For all of its limitations, this is the promise of Linnaean classification, to be able to understand the specific and unique character of each contributing member of an ecosystem. Trouble is, with grass, it’s damn hard. As anyone who has spent time staring at a young stand of annual Mediterranean grasses, trying to suss out what is Italian Rye, what is Wild Oat, and what is Ripgut Brome before they have produced seed heads knows, many grasses look incredibly similar.
Perhaps, it’s because sight is low on the list of sensorial perception, for those whose heads dwell closer to the earth. Ruminants seem to have no problem, using taste, touch, and smell to pick their choicest morsel out of this green buffet. Indeed, when one’s life, or at the very least one’s livelihood, hinges on understanding a thing, one becomes intimately familiar with the subtle nuances of it’s specific nature.
That being said, the specific nature of a specific grass and all of its specific characteristics, are only part of understanding it. Coming from a culture accustomed to picking things apart, breaking them down to their component pieces, and then reassembling them in order to ascertain their essence, this piece comes more naturally to me. But it is relationships, not elements, that compose an ecosystem. The true narrative of a grassland (and a human body, and a biosphere) is that of interaction and exchange; the temporal and spatial diversity is mediated by the alchemy of transmutation. Nothing is static. Everything is becoming. It is not enough to be able to name each individual in the community laid out before me, as my rubber boots send sprays of dew flying from delicate blades. My job, as one who cares deeply about this place, is to understand how they interact and change, grow, desiccate, and decay over time; and how these enormously complex cycles effect, support, suppress, and transform one another. These systems are not only more complex than we know, they are more complex than we can know.1
And this is what’s so damn fun about it. If I let go of having a comprehensive and definitive understanding of everything going on in a field of grass, I can make space for something far more enjoyable than certainty-- curiosity.
It was mid December, and the rains were late. How could I explain this green halo of recently germinated green tips poking up beneath this canopy of this ridgetop live oak, standing in stark contrast with the dry expanse of last years lignified residual matter expanding beyond its drip line. Was early morning coastal fog, caught on the vast surface area of its small cupped leaves, collected and deposited on the ground beneath? Did the deposit of these leaves over the years, create a nutrient rich duff layer below, providing the perfect parameters for germination. Did the mycorrhizal fungi, expanding the reach of the tree's roots and connecting it with the surrounding oaks, also link it to these little blades of grass? Or was it simply that the soil on this ridge top, deeper and less eroded than that on the slope beyond, which provided fertile grounds for this acorn to grow so many years ago, conferred the same benefits to the seed bank of grass that lays within it? These questions don’t demand answers. There is no perfect control group against which to compare them. Rather they encourage exploration; demand more data points; elicit further questions; invite me to look deeper, and longer, at everything.
Here’s the thing I love about all of this, it’s not an esoteric philosophical inquiry; it’s a practical and essential component of my job. It’s the difference between management of land based on a concept, and management based on what is actually in front of you. Of course there is an essential role for a framework in which to place one’s observations and inquiries. The paradigms so many working in the regenerative agriculture space subscribe to provide guidance in how to engage with a landscape in a way that both produces food and rebuilds the health, diversity, and productivity of the ecology. But often it seems the techniques/practices of this paradigm are confused with the patterns. There is no playbook. The true work is in observation and interaction, followed by the interpretation of that information through the lens of these patterns.
An example. Here’s a fairly universal pattern: keeping animals bunched together and moving fertilizes and defoliates grasses, providing them sufficient time to recover between disturbances. How that pattern is applied to the management of different landscapes, at different times of year, during different weather conditions and stages of grass phenology, that’s where the art is. The questions of interpreting and deciding upon the variables within this pattern --how many animals, how densely packed, how long are they grazed for, how much should grasses recover before the animals return-- this is where there is no substitution for intimate observation of, and ultimately relationship with, the unique dynamics of every landscape.
If I’m being honest, this didn’t always come naturally to me. Often it still doesn’t. I come from a culture of experts; an elite group who purport to hold a monopoly on truth and its dissemination. I’m a voracious reader, and tend to turn to books (and the “experts” that write them) first when looking for answers. Books can point me towards the patterns, but they cannot tell me how to apply them in the places I care for. This is what grass has taught me. To slow down and actually engage with what is right in front of me. And this is truly a gift beyond measure.
I’m paraphrasing from someone in the holistic management world, though I can’t for the life of me remember who.
Thanks for this beautifully written ode to grass, infused with lots of information (new info to me!) and meaningful personal reflections. A treat to read...
Another beautifully written and thoughtful exploration of a part of the world I don't think about that much: the part right under my feet! Thanks again for opening my eyes to something new, and for the great pictures (I have always liked my reading with pictures). Also, loved your confessional footnote. : )