That's Kentucky Bluegrass!

An equine's delicacy

May 02, 2025

ALSO KNOWN AS: Poa pratensis, smooth meadow grass, common meadow grass, bird grass

From a distance:

The grass of picket fences and pastures
Soft grass with blue flowerheads
Bluegrass has been used to feed racehorses, which was a big industry in Kentucky. It’s the grass of most stadiums.
Bluegrass is also a kind of music that references the rolling hills and the Appalachian music that came down from their peaks.
Kentucky Blue Grass, taken at a house's front yard with Canon camera, 17 April 2021, Author: Pilot138-17, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kentucky_Blue_Grass.jpg, Kentucky bluegrass is one of the most common grasses on Wild Horse island and this is likely a reflection of a history of intensive grazing. Bighorn sheep in the area of the hold homestead, farm, and orchard to the south of Skeeko Bay. This entire area is dominated by exotic perennial grasses, most notably Kentucky bluegrass, quackgrass, and smooth brome. Date: 14 June 2020, Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/35478170@N08/50035909091/, Author: Matt Lavin

What are your “lawn goals?” Dense, durable, hard as a rock - but green. Soft, but not so soft you would forget about your job or responsibilities. Meadows have a way of bringing us into a dreamy state, with its long swaying grasses, but lawns give us beauty and discipline. Grass should be just as controlled as your life. Do you get pesky clovers and spots of dandelion? Is your lawn overrun with anything at all? You need Kentucky bluegrass: with roots so hard they could be claws, gripping the land together. Just dig out your land and carpet it with the stuff and you’ll be grateful every time you put a mower to it. You may even love that lawn better than you love your dog. It’s just as loyal.

The Perfect Lawn

If you have ever imagined a house with a picket fence. If you have seen the perfect lawns depicted in the suburban catastrophe of the multiples, you have seen Kentucky bluegrass. It’s not the Bermuda grass of the south. It’s the grass that’s everywhere in the north of the US - starting maybe around Kentucky, where there are winters that swing with snow and all the way up into Canada. Kentucky bluegrass grows in every state, but you’ll see it more in northern states and southern Canada. If you’ve ever felt soft grass on bare toes, rather than serrated edged grass. If you’ve seen grass the color of emerald you’ll have seen Kentucky bluegrass.

When settlers came to the Americas and brought their horses, they brought nutritious grasses. Settlers brought all of the plants they knew to create a life in a landscape they could not have dreamed of. And Kentucky bluegrass, full of amino acids and fiber, was the delicacy for their cattle.

Of course it’s a plant. Of course it’s grass. It’s part of the large Poaceae family, kin to rice, bamboo, wheat, phragmites, and pampas grass. What better way to fill space than to let grass grow and make thick sods of its roots and drown out the rest?

If given the time to grow - rather than getting mowed down - Kentucky bluegrass will reach between one to two feet. Just tall enough to see the landscape ahead. The panicle, the way the tiny grass flowers fall, is in a cone shape. The base of the plant whorls out with three to five stems; they're connected to a network of rhizomes under the ground that winds the soil up into a thick blanket. On each of those stems leaves grow up like soft lances. The flowers turn bluish when they bloom and the seed sheaths keep those blue tips. Yeah, Kentucky bluegrass can behave invasively. I would always encourage you to rid your lawns of it in place of native flora that feed the bees and the soil. It should be managed, but it’s always wanted, expected, and because of that it’s invisible.

Kentucky bluegrass is native to all of Europe and northern Asia, and the mountains of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia: The Atlas Mountains. The animals must love the soft grass, Kentucky bluegrass was brought for the horses as they went out to the newly segmented lands of the Americas first with the Spanish empire in the 1600s. It needs sun, but it does well in some drought, moist, and cold conditions. It’s pervasive. While the plant is usually a signifier of fertile soil, it also grows in soil that is sucked of nutrition - soil so hard it looks like rock or turned up. The seeds will grow and grow even in that soil. So they have become aggressive in Canadian plains and Pacific Northwest clearings.

It isn’t used by pollinator species of the Americas, so despite the green they are nearly a wasteland for pollinators. But the large grazers: cattle and horses, deer, and elk eat Kentucky bluegrass. It’s an imperfect puzzle piece in the American ecosystem, favored much more than it should be.

The reason why mowed Kentucky bluegrass is so soft on our feet is because it rarely gets a chance to flower, or “bolt.” When plants flower they harden up, they poison up, they protect their flower from the world, and prepare for their fruit to weigh their bodies down. Kentucky bluegrass is naturally softer than most grasses, but it’s extra soft when it’s young and partly succulent.

In Greek, Poa means food, fodder. Pratensis means meadow: Meadow food. The emerald of green. The perfect grass that you could lay your head in, a home.

If you know music, you know bluegrass is the American Appalachian music that has its roots in old Scottish and Irish culture. Bluegrass, a kind of music that was named by Bill Monroe, is a variety of songs that once rang in the mountains, beginning with the Scotch-Irish immigrants who found home on those slopes. Then it merged into the blues from freed or escaped African Americans. All of them looked out at the rolling pastures of bluegrass and saw an imperfect home. The rolling hills of green meant there were horses and cattle, which, in turn, meant a kind of wealth and stability. Many of these songs don’t reflect that stability of wealth. But they touch on the communal - the desire for connection. The way grasses connect. The music is brought to life with banjo, fiddle, and mandolin, harmonized vocalization, strife, and a broken heart. The music was touched by spirituals, and superstitions, but fundamentally described daily life: the life of miners. The songs spoke about killings and activists, of poverty and death.

Music is a good way to see the way culture develops and entwines with other cultures. Bluegrass is connected also to music brought and developed by working and poor These songs were a mix of traditional-you can hear the medieval still ringing in them, with their day-to-day lives. The music made a swoop down to the Delta where the music merged with gospel and traditional songs by the enslaved Africans. Eventually these strands wove to make rock and roll and then the music.

What a strange country we are - new - based in genocide, slavery, and the pursuit of happiness - at some perverse expense. The other day my student read a section in her textbook about the invention of the cotton gin. One of the comprehension questions was “was the invention of the cotton gin good for the south?” I felt ill. We talked about it: no. But people made money. This seems like big AMERICA energy: is it good? No. But people made money. The invisible question echoed: But at whose expense?

A Grass for the Athlete

And why Kentucky bluegrass? Beside our city planning and architecture, plants will always find some way through, and those plants tell history. Sometimes they will tell you about ancient history: what minerals are in the earth, and how that place has been managed. Sometimes they will tell you about accidents, plants that escaped gardens or seed that fell out of pockets.

The geology of Kentucky is defined by thousands of years of sea, one of the more prominent rocks in the region is limestone that was developed from the Mississipian sea about 340 million years ago. This limestone soil of Kentucky is the perfect home for bluegrass. There is a bluegrass region in the north near Lexington where once a glacier kneaded the land. It is now known for its rolling pastureland, and the food for the purebred, fine racing and showing horses. Kentucky is the American home of the Kentucky Derby and the beautiful horses there.

Imagine the force with which the Kentucky bluegrass adheres to the earth. Bluegrass is the grass of athletes all around.

The Browns play on bluegrass as well as the Yankees and the Red Sox and the Cubs, the Red Bulls, and more. Of course, the plant is so popular that new varieties and strains have been developed - versions of bluegrass.

And it’s not just fodder for cattle. Horses love Kentucky bluegrass. It isn’t as substantial as hay. As far as grasses grow, it isn’t that tall. But the horse loves the Kentucky blue grass. Grasshoppers feed on bluegrass, along with salt and pepper skipper moth and sun beetles, and the meadow brown butterfly uses the Kentucky blue grass as its larval food.

It may be a result of my limited ability to research. It may be where the information is on grass and why, but I can’t seem to find the history of bluegrass beyond its arrival in North America. In fact there are some botanists who argue that some bluegrasses in mountains in the west are, in fact, native. Bluegrass has woven its way into Americanness, as if to erase its own history.

One reason for its blurry past could be that bluegrass as a species hybridizes well with a range of grasses, which is one reason why it has been so useful to humans. We select for genes that are helpful to us. And in other ways, perhaps they have hybridized on their own. Plants are not people, and they should not be compared to people, but they have stories. Maybe in the same way bluegrass music became a braid, a web of experience in America, the Kentucky bluegrass holds in its aesthetic, in its mythology, and even in its nutrition about a reminder of the people who worked to make the country what it is. The sweat and blood and confusion that brought it into existence. The grass of grass roots movements. The workers played bluegrass, the enslaved people sang it and remade it. It has a home somewhere far away but finds itself here and struggling alongside the workers.

If there is anything common in this big country it’s seen in this grass. Related to horses, our closest and fastest companion. The animal that, perhaps even more than the dog or the goat, taught us… not only how to travel quickly, but to love deeply. The tears of many poor and working - and before that - enslaved - Americans must have come out blue green.

Myth for kentucky bluegrass

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Text for myth Music: me singing The Cuckoo Bird, an old bluegrass classic. Don’t judge me - I’m singing this in memory of Rob Caldwell.

Not to be confused with tall fescue. This one is very similar to bluegrass, but it grows in sods, or clumps, rather than rhizomes. It’s also a bit more serrated than bluegrass.