Yorkshire Fog (Holcus lanatus)
- This is a very familiar grass and easy to spot on Cowbar lane verges and next to the Cleveland way.
- It is a perennial which flowers from May to August.
- Yorkshire-fog is also known as ‘velvet grass’ and ‘meadowsoft’.
- In the UK, it may have got its name from a description of how it looks at a distance: misty and grey with a purple tinge, which is said to be something between northern smoke-billowing factories and heather moorland.
- It has softly hairy leaves, nodes and stems and cattle and other stock are not keen on it, though they may eat it when it is young. Rabbits will graze on it.
- It will tolerate a range of soils and conditions so is sometimes used a land stabiliser and for sheep grazing where soil nutrients are poor.
- It grows in dense clumps, with stalks up to a metre tall, and will dominate other plants so can reduce diversity.
- Each plant can produce up to 240,000 seeds, carried on the wind.
- The head of flowers is called a panicle, or inflorescence, and starts off fairly tightly packed and a reddish colour, becoming grey green and opening out to a ‘Christmas tree’ shape as the grass ripens, then closing up again and getting paler as the plant ages.
- It is the main food plant of the caterpillars of the small skipper and Essex skipper butterflies.
- The base of the stem has a striped pink appearance – sometimes referred to as pink pyjama stripes.
