General: Annual grass often with stolons; stems erect, hollow, up to 100 cm tall.
Leaves: Sheaths open; blades mostly 5-10 mm wide, flat; ligules 6-11 mm long, pointed, entire or commonly with jagged margins, usually folded back in growth, hairy.
Flowers: Inflorescence of numerous, short, appressed to ascending, narrow, congested, racemose to paniculate spikes, up to 30 cm long, the spikes 1-2 cm long; spikelets 1-flowered, articulating below the glumes, unstalked, borne closely aggregated in 2 rows on one side of the rachis; glumes strongly compressed and inflated, semi-circular, 3-nerved, abruptly pointed, about 3 mm long; lemmas lanceolate, much narrower than the glumes, lightly 5-nerved, somewhat long-pointed, slightly larger than the 2-nerved paleas, 1.8-3.5 mm long; rachillas not prolonged; anthers 1-1.4 mm long; lodicules almost 1 mm long.
Shores, marshes, wet meadows and ditches in the steppe and montane zones; frequent throughout BC east of the Coast-Cascade Mountains; N to AK, YT and NT, E to PQ and S to ME, MA, PA, OH, IL, MO, KS, NM, AZ and CA.
The table below shows the species-specific information calculated from original data (BEC database) provided by the BC Ministry of Forests and Range. (Updated August, 2013)
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