A concentrated botanical study — a single cluster of tall shore grasses rendered with exceptional individual attention against a near-white ground. The grasses are the most specifically described in the collection: each blade or stem painted individually, varying in color from dark brown to pale green-gray to pure green, their different ages and stages visible in the color variation. At the base of the stems, a row of small yellow-ringed circles — seeds or pebbles — creates a formal lower boundary, connecting to the stone-and-seed vocabulary of the Garden in Snow (668) and the Pebble Arrangements (664).
The composition is organized vertically: the grasses rise from the lower zone of seeds and yellow ground marks upward through the majority of the picture field, the tallest stems reaching almost to the top edge. This vertical orientation gives the composition an energy that the horizontal landscape works don't have — the grasses are reaching, growing, aspiring.
Small green marks at various heights suggest new shoots or side-branches emerging from the main stems — the same botanical specificity Sidney applied to the bamboo paintings, his attention to the places where growth branches and proliferates. At the very top of the composition, the finest stems end in small pointed tips that have the quality of calligraphic marks — the junction between observation and the abstract mark.
The pale ground is not truly empty: faint washes of yellow and green create a soil zone at the base, a light-filled air zone above. The grasses exist in an environment, not in a void.