Location Taken: Agewa Bay, Ontario, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010
I don’t have too much to say about this piece, I just felt like posting a pretty picture of beach grass taken at Agewa Bay.
Do you know how important beach grass is?
There’s a lot of erosion at work at a beach, between the sea pushing and pulling, the wind changing direction, and the sun beating down and weathering the open land below. Beach grass helps keep that in check, letting beaches stay stable over the years.
It’s not just an irritatingly itchy plant that you walk past to get to the beach.
There’s a reason there’s signs up saying “Don’t Walk on the Beach Grass” at most public beaches. For beaches with sand, the grass usually has a very fragile hold at its margins, and can easily be destroyed by careless tourists. Beach grass lives in a place no other plant bothers with, slowly converting the sand to sandy soil. Then the other plants move in, and the beach grass gets displaced. Or the erosion forces win, and the soil the plants near the beach are living in gets turned back to sand, and the beach grass gets shoved back to there.
It’s tough being beach grass.
This beach, however, is a stone beach (it’s really obvious in this earlier post). This means it’s poor for swimmers and sunbathers, but great for beach grass. Stone doesn’t shift as easily as sand, so the grass can get a firmer foothold. And it takes a lot longer to convert it to soil. Beach grass actually has a somewhat stable home on the edge of stony beaches. And you can walk on it at such places. That’s how I got the photo.
I guess I did have something to say after all.
