Abstract:
The large and economically important grass family is notoriously difficult to classify
because the highly specialized and reduced flower necessitates the use of fine morphological
distinctions for the separation of taxa. Fortunately leaf blade anatomy has proved to be an invaluable
aid in the classification and identification of the Poaceae. This project was initiated primarily
to increase our knowledge of the systematics of the grasses of southern Africa but with
the secondary objective of serving as basic data for several applied biological disciplines. A brief
outline of these objectives will be followed by a short explanation of the methodology adopted
and of the layout and presentation of this thesis.
