By Tom Schweich
Now that it is getting a little warm (Ha!), we can talk about how we have two very distinct groups of grasses in Golden: cool season and warm season. Cool and warm season grasses have different metabolisms. Cool season grasses form chains of three carbon atoms and are called C3 grasses. Warm season grasses on the other hand form chains of four carbon atoms and are called C4 grasses.
Cool season grasses like June grass, indian rice grass, and needle and thread, have all turned brown. Now we are coming into the warm season grasses.
Buffalo grass is usually the first of the warm season grasses to bloom. Other warm season grasses that will be blooming soon are blue grama and side-oats grama, and little bluestem and big bluestem.
Buffalo Grass is a widespread common short-grass prairie grass. Around Golden it has been found on North and South Table Mountains, and on Schweich Hill. It is probably also in Kinney Run and on Tin Cup Ridge, I just have not seen it there.
One character of buffalo grass is that it has separate staminate (male) and pistillate (female) plants that look very different. When Thomas Nuttall first collected the grass on his 1811 trip to the upper Missouri River, he named the staminate (male) plant, not recognizing that there should have also been a pistillate (female) plant. Meanwhile, the pistillate (female) plant of buffalo grass was described with a completely different name from specimens found in Texas.
George Engelmann, MD (1859) recognized that Buffalo Grass has male and female flowers on separate plants (termed “dioecious”), and that a new genus name was needed for it. He used the Greek words for buffalo (bubalo) and grass (chloë) and contracted them together to form the name Buchloë. Since the root words forming a scientific name should be pronounced separately, Buchloë should be pronounced “Boo-chloe.”
Recent genetic studies have shown that separating buffalo grass (Buchloë sp.) from the grama grasses (Bouteloua sp.) is not supported by scientific data, and therefore we should be calling buffalo grass Bouteloua dactyloides (Nutt.) Columbus.
