tussock

plural tussocks · alternative tussac · alternative tussack

1. A tuft or clump of green grass or similar verdure, forming a small hillock.

   An Indian grazing ground is all rocks and scrub and tussocks and little ravines, among which the herds scatter and disappear.

   1894 May, Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, London; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., published June 1894, →OCLC

   2 more examples

   Next morning I was off to Lochtully, which, as you know, is in the north of Perthshire. It stands three miles from the station, a great gray pinnacled house, with two towers cocking out above the fir woods, like a hare’s ears from a tussock of grass.

   1895, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, The Stark Munro Letters: […], London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC

   One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray.

   1981, Salman Rushdie, chapter 1, in Midnight's Children

2. Tussock grass.

   I yearned, painfully, for […] a sight and touch of a hillside covered with golden tussock.

   1985, Janet Frame, An Angel at my Table, Virago, published 2024, page 401