General: Perennial, strongly tufted grass from fibrous roots; stems often decumbent, and rooting at the nodes, not bulbous at the base, 15-50 cm tall/long.
Leaves: Sheaths smooth; blades flat, 4-7 mm wide, the margins rough; ligules blunt, nearly entire, 1-3 (4) mm long; ear-shaped lobes at the leaf-bases lacking or small and blunt to rounded, more obvious on the upper leaves.
Flowers: Inflorescence a nearly globe-shaped to short-cylindrical panicle, 1-4.5 cm long, often over 1 cm wide when pressed; glumes hairy on the sides, fringed with long, bristlelike hairs on the keels, 3.5-4.5 mm long, abruptly narrowed to the stout awns, the awns 1.5-2.5 (3) mm long; lemmas short-hairy, toothed by the 5 nerves, 2-2.5 mm long; paleas nearly equal to the lemmas; anthers 1-1.4 (1.5) mm long.
Moist to mesic meadows and streambanks from the montane to alpine zones; common throughout BC except rare on the Queen Charlotte Islands and Vancouver Island; circumpolar, N to AK, YT and NT, E to NF and S to NH, ME, SD, NM, AZ and CA; Greenland, Iceland, Eurasia, S America.
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)
