General: Perennial grass from fibrous roots; stems usually hairy at the nodes but sometimes smooth, 50-100 cm tall.
Leaves: Sheaths usually open for 1-2 cm, smooth (or the throats fringed with long, fine hairs) to thickly soft-hairy; blades 5-10 (15) mm wide, lax, flat, smooth to soft-hairy on the upper surfaces and sometimes the lower ones; ear-shaped lobes lacking at the leaf-bases; ligules minutely jagged and fringed with fine hairs, 0.5-1 (1.5) mm long.
Notes: Bromus ciliatus is a variable species with some plants having either shorter anthers or differences in hairiness. The phase, B. richardsonii, recognized by Welsh (1974) and Pavlick (1995) has so many overlapping characters with B. ciliatus that its recognition appears meaningless, even at a subspecific level. I have followed the treatments by Hitchcock and Chase (1951), Hitchcock (1969), Holmgren and Holmgren (1977) and Wilken and Painter (1993) which submerge B. richardsonii within B. ciliatus.
Wet streambanks and lake margins to mesic meadows and open forests in the montane zone; frequent in BC in and E of the Coast-Cascade Mountains; N to AK, YT and NT, E to NF and S to ME, MA, PA, NC, NE, TX, 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)
