General: Perennial grass from conspicuous rhizomes; stems smooth to hairy, 20-120 cm tall.
Leaves: Sheaths smooth to stiff-hairy or soft-hairy; blades 3-10 mm wide, flat, smooth to soft-hairy or stiff-hairy; ear-shaped lobes at the bases of at least some of the leaves up to 1 mm long; ligules minutely jagged or more or less fringed with fine hairs, 0.5-2.5 mm long.
Flowers: Inflorescence a narrow panicle, (5) 7-20 (27) cm long, the branches ascending to erect; spikelets 5- to 13-flowered, often strongly purplish-tinged, narrow, tapered from near the base, nearly circular in cross-section to somewhat compressed, 1.5-3 (5) cm long; glumes lanceolate, narrowly to broadly translucent-margined, the lower ones usually 1- (rarely 3-) nerved, 4-6 (8) mm long, the upper ones (3) 5-nerved, mostly smooth to strongly hairy, 6-10 mm long; lemmas smooth to hairy or rough, rounded on the backs, 10-13 mm long, the tips blunt, only shallowly bidentate, unawned and merely abruptly pointed or with awns 1-2 (4) mm long; paleas nearly equal to the lemmas; anthers 3, exserted, 4-6 mm long.
Moist to dry disturbed sites, fields, grassy slopes, meadows and forest edges in all but the alpine zone; ssp. inermis - infrequent in C, SC and SE BC, rare northward and westward; ssp. pumpellianus - frequent in BC east of the Coast-Cascade Mountains; ssp. inermis - introduced from Eurasia; ssp. pumpellianus - N to AK, YT and NT, E to AB and ON and S to CO.
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)
