General: Perennial, strongly tufted grass from fibrous roots; stems nearly circular in cross-section, tapered, hollow or sometimes pith-filled, smooth, up to 100 cm tall.
Leaves: Sheaths open; blades strongly in-rolled, 2-4 mm wide, smooth beneath, very finely minutely rough above, sparsely and copiously stiff-hairy just above the ligules and along the throats, the longer hairs about 3 mm long, the collars smooth; ligules scarcely 0.5 mm long.
Flowers: Inflorescence an open panicle, (10) 15-40 cm long, projecting beyond sheaths, the branches slender, spreading, bearing spikelets mainly near the tips; spikelets 1-flowered; glumes sharp-pointed, unequal, the lower ones about 1 mm long, the upper ones nearly twice as long, either or both often deciduous before the florets; lemmas 2-2.5 mm long, paleas nearly equal to the lemmas, tending to split to the base with maturity; lodicules fan-shaped, about 0.25 mm long; anthers 1-1.3 mm long.
Moist to mesic, often alkaline slopes, grasslands and shrublands in the steppe zone; rare in SC BC, known only from Osoyoos and Keremeos; S to AR, TX, MX 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)
