Looks like double high plant growth got broken. Take some grass use bone meal on it to grow it into a double block high grass. The top block will be missing completely at first I thought this was my texture pack causing this. First elimated texture pack by using default, then started at vanilla 1.8 server and worked up to 1.8.3

Vanilla 1.8 correctly grows plants...

Repo: plant normal plant that can grown to double high (eg. 175:2 double_plant aka double tallgrass ) block, use bonemeal on it to make it grow into a double high block... result will end up with a single high block with the lower half texture of a double high block. The top half block missing completely and not generated in world.