Blue Grass
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Blue Grass. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a valuable grass of North America . It is called also June grass, from the month in which it usually goes to seed. It grows throughout a wide range from Tennessee far into Canada. It is a durable pasture grass. It stands trampling and drouth well. It comes early in the spring and lasts until the frosts are severe. It is also one of the most nutritious grasses. It favors a flow of milk and gives stock sound bone, wind, and flesh. It gives its name to the famous Blue Grass Region of Kentucky. Blue grass forms one of the finest lawn swards known. It may be grown from seed or by transplanting sod. The latter method is that followed usually in making terraces or covering exposed banks. A thin sod sets better than a thick one, for the reason that new roots find their way sooner into the soil of the bank. The persistence of blue grass and its ability to stand dry midsummers is due to slender root-stalks that hold life like a potato and send up green blades with every shower. Seed is gathered by horse power in an open box, the front edge of which is furnished with a sort of comb which strips off the ripened seed. See Grasses; Kentucky Grass is the forgiveness of nature--her constant benediction. Fields trampled with battle, saturated with blood, torn with the ruts of cannon, grow green again with grass, and carnage is forgotten. Streets abandoned by traffic, become grass grown like rural lanes, and are obliterated. Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal. It invades the solitude of deserts, climbs the inaccessible slopes of mountains, modifies climates and determines the history, character and destiny of nations. Unobtrusive and patient, it has immortal vigor and aggression. Banished from the thoroughfare and the field, it bides its time to return, and when vigilance is relaxed, or the dynasty has perished, it silently resumes the throne from which it has been expelled, but which it never abdicates. It bears no blazonry of bloom to charm the senses with fragrance or splendor, but its homely hue is more enchanting than the lily or the rose. It yields no fruit in earth or air, and yet, should its harvest fail for a single year, famine would depopulate the world.--John J. Ingalls, Marvelous Blue Grass.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a grass cultivated for pasturage in northern and central Kentucky, deriving its name from the underlying strata of blue limestone which gives it a luxuriant growth, and distinguished from other species by flat panicles, smooth culms and sheaths, and short, blunt ligules. The blue grass region occupies about 10,000 square miles in northern Kentucky. The soil is very rich, and agriculture, especially the raising of tobacco and hemp, is carried on with great success. The pastures support the horses and live stock for which Kentucky is famous.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's called blue grass in 1910 "a valuable grass of North America," and that was the common belief; botanists now hold that Kentucky bluegrass, Poa pratensis, is a Eurasian species carried in with colonial livestock and seed, spreading so far ahead of settlement that it was taken for a native. The Kentucky region it named has also changed its crops: Collier's praised the tobacco and hemp of the Blue Grass in 1921, but hemp growing collapsed after the Second World War and was only relegalized federally in 2018, while the tobacco quota system that long underpinned the region's farms was bought out in 2004. Both entries treat the plant purely as pasture and lawn; since the 1940s the name has travelled furthest as music, after Bill Monroe's band the Blue Grass Boys gave a whole genre its name. Aiton's praise of blue grass as "one of the finest lawn swards known" still holds in cool-climate lawns, though its thirst has made it a target of turf-removal rules in the dry American West.
Written for this edition, 2026.