E-Flora BC: Electronic Atlas of the Flora of British Columbia

General:
Perennial, tufted grass from fibrous roots; stems rough or short-hairy, 10-50 (70) cm tall.

Leaves:
Sheaths open, the basal sheaths short-hairy; blades folded to flat, minutely rough, 1.5-4 (5) mm wide; ligules usually hairy externally, finely jagged and more or less fringed with fine hairs, 0.5-2 (averaging 1) mm long.

Flowers:
Inflorescence a dense, spikelike, usually continuous but often interrupted, purplish, tawny or silvery panicle, 2-15 cm long; spikelets 2- to 3-flowered, nearly unstalked; glumes membranous, the lower ones averaging about (3) 4 (4.5) mm long, the upper ones mostly rough on the keels, 1/5-1/4 longer and about 1/2 again as wide, usually surpassing the lower florets and nearly equal to the upper florets; lemmas usually minutely rough, 4-5 mm long, bidentate, awned, the awns strongly abruptly bent, broadly spreading, arising up to 1.5 mm below the tips of the lemmas, 5-6 mm long; lodicules nearly entire to sharply lobed, about 0.7-1 mm long; anthers up to 1.5 mm long.

Notes:
This is a highly variable species which cannot realistically be separated into infraspecific taxa. Even Hulten (1959), who recognized 14 subspecies in the T. spicatum complex, stated that "...the differentiation between the different taxa becomes somewhat arbitrary..." for our western cordilleran material.