Long white creeping roots that can spread from hedges into crops and are hard to eradicate
Common couch — also known as twitch.
Nature · Ferns, grasses & other plants
Common couch
Native · flowers June–August · to 1.5 m · arable fields, verges and waste ground
Elymus repens (also Elytrigia repens) — Poaceae
Common couch, the couch grass or twitch of gardeners and farmers, is a tall, tuft-forming grass of arable land, verges and waste ground whose long, tough, white underground rhizomes make it a famously stubborn weed. It flowers from June to August in a slim spike of golden spikelets, and its roots were harvested in the Second World War as a mild diuretic. Its caterpillars feed the speckled wood and ringlet butterflies.
How to spot them
- ▸Long, thin, flat flower spike with spikelets set broadside on to the stem, in two neat rows
- ▸Flat, bluish-green leaves, rough above, with small claw-like auricles clasping the stem at the base
- ▸Pale, wiry, creeping rhizomes with sharp tips that pierce through soil and even potatoes
- ▸Tall, up to 1.5 m, in dense stands at field margins and roadsides
- ▸Look-alike: perennial ryegrass has edge-on spikelets and no rhizomes; sea couch and sand couch are coastal cousins
How to know it
Its local names include twitch, wickens and grandmother grass
Common couch — Wildlife Trusts.
The roots were harvested during the Second World War as a mild diuretic
Common couch.
Spikelets sit flat-faced against the stem, unlike the edge-on spikelets of its lookalike ryegrass
Common couch.
Larval foodplant for the speckled wood and ringlet butterflies, though a nuisance in arable fields
Common couch.
The name comes from an Old English word meaning 'quick' or 'lively', for the way it regrows from any fragment
Common couch — cognate with quitch and quick.
Quick-fire facts
- •Tall tuft-forming grass, up to 1.5 m, flowering June to August
- •Long tough roots spread it from hedges and field margins into crops
- •Roots harvested in the Second World War as a mild diuretic (Wildlife Trusts)
- •Local names include twitch, couch grass, wickens and grandmother grass
- •Provides food for the caterpillars of the speckled wood and ringlet butterflies
- •The Wildlife Trusts list it as Elytrigia repens; Elymus repens is the name now generally used, and it was formerly Agropyron repens
- •Couch is thought to be from the Old English cwice, 'living', related to quick
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Sources
- The Wildlife Trusts — Common couch