Fern-grass (Catapodium rigidum)

Fern-grass (Catapodium rigidum). Frome, 5 May 2024.

A briefly immaculate "lawn" of Fern-grass on a stony sloping bank in a Frome trading estate. 

Like most grasses it has been given numerous scientific names. It is now Catapodium rigidum but in the books of my youth it was Desmazeria rigida. 

It's a small annual grass of dry places. I usually see it in town on walls, stone-heaps, etc. I've read that it also appears on sand and chalk.

Fairly common in most of the British Isles: its heartland is SW Europe, N Africa, the Middle East and Macaronesia (which I had to look up... it means the volcanic island groups of the E Atlantic: Cape Verde, Canaries, Madeira, Azores...)

The Swedish name is styvgröe ("stiff grass") but it has only been recorded in Sweden as a rare urban casual (Gotland, Uppsala and a few other scattered places). 

It was recently found on Peberholm/Pepparholm, the 1995 artificial island where the Öresund Bridge (connecting Denmark to Sweden) becomes a tunnel, a place with no public access but visited annually by biologists studying natural colonisation. It now has 600 plant and moss species, and thirty species of nesting birds including a large colony of spoonbills. 

Fern-grass (Catapodium rigidum). Frome, 5 May 2024.

The rigidity/stiffness refers to the stem and the spikelet stalks. The English name notes the vague resemblance to a fern frond. 

Fern-grass (Catapodium rigidum). Frome, 20 May 2024.

Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:

And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.

(Matthew 13: 5-6)

Fern-grass may be specialized for stony ground, but the Parable of the Sower still applies, it's a chancy sort of environment. A couple of sunny weeks later, you can see that a good few of the hopeful young plants have perished. The rest, however, are cracking on; seed dispersal has already begun. 

Fern-grass (Catapodium rigidum). Frome, 20 May 2024.