Thread by @crawley_mick

Here is one of my candidates for ‘most elegant of all British grasses’. It’s Apera spica-venti, and has a droopy, shining golden inflorescence, made up of tiny spikelets with ridiculously long awns.

It stands about 1m tall, and its considerable height means that the individual spikelets (less than 3mm long) look even smaller than they are. The awns can be up to 4 times this length (they are as much as10mm long and are seldom less than 5mm).

Apera is one of the genera where there is just 1 floret per spikelet, hidden completely by the glumes (Key F in Stace, with companions like Agrostis and Polypogon)

It is common only in eastern England and is found most often as a weed of winter cereal crops on dry, sandy soils. Its familiar name is highly descriptive: Loose Silky-bent.

It's fiddly, because all the parts are so small, but opening up the glumes with fine tweezers will expose the single lemma and palea and show the insertion of the the base of the awn just below the tip of the lemma.

This is one of Silwood Park's most notable rarities, and the great George Claridge Druce recorded the plant from Silwood in 1891. We dedicate the plot known as Ashurst Four Acre Field to its conservation: we cultivate the field each year in October, but don't sow a crop.