General: Perennial, tufted herb from fibrous roots; stems sharply triangular, 20-50 cm tall, exceeding the leaves.
Leaves: Sheaths tight; blades flat, 2-4 mm wide, borne on the lower 1/3 of the stem.
Flowers: Spikes 5 to 10 aggregated into a dense, triangular egg-shaped head, 1-2.5 cm in diameter, unstalked, with both female and male flowers, the female ones towards the tips; bracts subtending the spikes sheathless, reduced, inconspicuous.
Fruits: Perigynia egg-shaped, 3-4.5 mm long, 1-1.5 mm wide, dark green to brown, with copper-brown edges, the margins winged nearly to the bases and the upper 1/2 fringed with teeth, lightly several-nerved on the backs, with faint nerves or nerveless below, the beaks shallowly bidentate, up to 1 mm long, narrowly margined and toothed below; female scales elliptical, brown, with broad translucent margins, somewhat shorter and narrower than the perigynia; stigmas 2; achenes lens-shaped, 0.8-1.3 mm long.
Lakeshores and moist to mesic meadows, forests, grassy slopes and shrub carrs and forest openings in the montane to alpine zones; frequent in N BC, rare in S BC in and east of the Coast-Cascade Mountains; disjunct circumpolar, N to AK, YT and NT, disjunct to Labr., S to WY and CO; Greenland, Iceland, N Europe, S Chile, Falkland Islands.
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)
