Quickgrass

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A tough perennial grass that spreads through underground runners and is often treated as a stubborn garden weed
2. Couch grass, a wild grass whose spreading root system makes it very difficult to eradicate from fields and gardens
3. A creeping grass species with long pale rhizomes that colonizes cultivated ground and resists removal

Etymology: The "quick" in quickgrass is the older sense of the adjective, meaning living or alive, as in the phrase "the quick and the dead." The plant earned the name because its underground stems keep growing, so the grass seems to stay alive wherever a fragment of root remains. Gardeners know it as couch grass, a name that comes from the same older form of "quick," which once took shapes like "quitch" and "couch." The plant spreads by creeping rhizomes that send up new shoots along their length, and even small pieces left in the soil can sprout into new plants.

Synonyms: couch grass, couch, quackgrass, witchgrass