Dangling Purple. False Oatgrass, Arrhenatherum elatius, Meibergpad, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
For great Linnaeus the genus was Avena - oat - and hence the name Oatgrass. In the early nineteenth century our grass was renamed Arrhenatherum, which is from the ancent Greek and means something like male awns, with reference to those purple stamens. In the 'elbows' of the awns you can just see the delicate white female florets. The scientific name was devised by an early French expert on grasses, Ambroise Marie François Joseph Palisot de Beauvais (1752-1820) in his Essai d'une nouvelle agrostographie (1812).
Dangling Purple. False Oatgrass, Arrhenatherum elatius, Meibergpad, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
For great Linnaeus the genus was Avena - oat - and hence the name Oatgrass. In the early nineteenth century our grass was renamed Arrhenatherum, which is from the ancent Greek and means something like male awns, with reference to those purple stamens. In the 'elbows' of the awns you can just see the delicate white female florets. The scientific name was devised by an early French expert on grasses, Ambroise Marie François Joseph Palisot de Beauvais (1752-1820) in his Essai d'une nouvelle agrostographie (1812).