Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Xerophyllum tenax, a grasslike perennial closely related to lilies, formerly used in basketweaving by the Native Americans.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • In Forks, at the foot of the Olympic National Park, there are run-down trailer parks on the edges of the town, inhabited by "brushpickers," mostly Guatemalan, who make a tenuous living by scavenging in the woods for the moss, ferns, beargrass, and salal used by florists around the world to add greenery to bouquets.

    American Pastoral Raban, Jonathan 2009

  • The farmland had gone wild here, taken over by poison oak, beargrass, and dodder, besides the inevitable blackberry bushes and gorse.

    Night World No. 1 L.J. Smith 1996

  • The farmland had gone wild here, taken over by poison oak, beargrass, and dodder, besides the inevitable blackberry bushes and gorse.

    Night World No. 1 L.J. Smith 1996

  • Shape. these hats are made of the bark of Cedar and beargrass wrought with the fingers so closely that it casts the rain most effectually in the Shape which they give them for their own use or that just discribed, on these hats they work various figures of different colours, but most commonly only black and white are employed. these figures are faint representations of the whales, the Canoes, and the harpooners Strikeing them.

    Original journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806 1904

  • We were visited today by two Clatsop women and two boys who brought a parsel of excellent hats made of Cedar bark and ornamented with beargrass. two of these hats had been made by measures which Capt.

    Original journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806 1904

  • Gibbons also heralds the area's vast reaches of avalanche lilies and white spires of beargrass flowers that flank the park's mountains and ridges.

    The Seattle Times 2011

  • Our hunters supplied us with four elk; and we had grapes and plums on the banks: we also saw the beargrass and rue, on the side of the bluffs.

    History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. To the Sources of the Missouri, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains and Down the River Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. Performed During the Years 1804-5-6. William Clark 1804

  • Members of the Picco family of Santa Cruz, Calif., enjoy their six-foot-wide cedar tub, which is nestled in a patch of beargrass and wild sweet peas.

    NYT > Home Page By JENNIFER BLEYER 2010

  • The cedar tub, six feet in diameter, seemed to fit better with their home, a mid-19th-century redwood farmhouse, especially when he placed the tub outside in a nest of beargrass and wild sweet peas.

    NYT > Home Page By JENNIFER BLEYER 2010

  • Learn to weave a basket using beargrass and other natural plant fibers.

    DesertUSA News 2009

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