On autumn roadsides, nothing is more abundant than foxtail grass: clump after clump topped with fuzzy tails, all wagging together when the wind comes, as if shaking useless little fans for the open field.

A Furry Little Tail

On autumn roadsides, nothing is more abundant than foxtail grass: clump after clump topped with fuzzy tails, all wagging together when the wind comes, as if shaking useless little fans for the open field. It grows no higher than the knee, yet its spike stands arrow-straight, each bristle on the spike held out stiff, coarse yet soft to the touch.

It stands in the most unnoticed places: field edges, cracks in the road, wall corners, abandoned ground. No watering, no fertilizing, no picky soil; nobody gives it a second glance as they pass, yet it grows autumn after autumn and never misses its season.

— Botany Notes, self-inscription —

A single stalk sways with no one tending,

yet learns the rice-flower way from the autumn wind.

From Wild Grass to Grain

Foxtail grass and foxtail millet belong to the same genus—it is precisely the millet’s close wild relative. From such wild grasses, the first farmers selected generation after generation, choosing plants with bigger spikes and fuller seeds, until they raised today’s food grains. The pedigree of the five grains is written on this roadside stalk of furry tail.

So farmers do not hate it; they simply guard against it: it looks too much like millet, and mixed in a field it is hard to tell apart. It is like a poor distant relation of the rice and sorghum in the field—of the same clan, just not of the branch that got selected.

Uses of the Wilds

When young and tender it is pasture grass that cattle and sheep love; its root system mats densely in the soil, so foxtail grass on a slope can hold back a layer of rain and grip a layer of earth—the cheapest slope-protection grass there is.

Its seeds can serve as feed, its dried stalks as fuel. It also holds an ecological role: pioneer of returning wasteland to green. The moment soil is bare, it moves in first, guarding that thin layer of earth for the plants that come later.

• How to know it: Annual herb, thirty to one hundred centimeters tall; leaves linear-lanceolate; panicle compressed into a cylindrical spike densely covered with bristles, shaped like a foxtail.
• When to enjoy: It peaks between summer and autumn; the spikes shift from green to yellow and the whole patch sways in the wind—the most enduring wild grass by the road.
• Close kin: It belongs to the same genus as foxtail millet (su) and is its wild relative; in a millet field it is hard to distinguish once mixed in.

A Single Bristling Spike

Look closely at one foxtail: between the bristles on the spike hide the true flowers and seeds. The bristles catch and hold the seeds; when the wind comes, the whole spike shakes, scattering seeds nearby, and also hitches a ride on people and livestock to distant places.

An utterly ordinary grass using the simplest method: no contending for spring light, no claiming of rich fields; it only, in autumn, makes seeds enough and scatters them enough, to wag its tail again somewhere else next year.

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Keywords: foxtail grass · Poaceae · wild grass · autumn