“A Cosmopolitan Weed of the World”: Following Bermudagrass

This essay is an exercise in “following.” It tells the story of Cynodon dactylon—better known as common bermudagrass—to explore why people either valued or devalued the grass through time and what the changing social status of one species might tell us about the intersection of biology, ecology, and culture. In the process, it makes two additional points: grasses are historically important, and agricultural history is a site uniquely disposed to uniting environmental history with the history of science.