General: Perennial grass from well-developed rhizomes, occasionally from stolons; stems solid, decumbent to erect, slightly flattened, smooth, 10-60 (100) cm tall.
Leaves: Sheaths smooth, slightly keeled and compressed near the base, strongly over-lapping; blades crowded, flat, occasionally folded, 1-2.8 (4) mm wide, 2-7 (11) cm long, smooth to minutely rough beneath, minutely rough above; ligules firm, fringed with fine hairs, squared-off at the tips, 0.2-1 mm long.
Flowers: Inflorescence an open, broadly egg-shaped panicle, 6-21 cm long, (2.5) 4-15 cm wide, ultimately deciduous, the branches hairlike, 3-12 cm long, ascending, spreading 30-90degree from stem axis at maturity; spikelets occasionally 2- or 3-flowered, on long, slender, hairlike stalks; glumes purplish, more or less below, especially along the nerves, 1-nerved, slightly unequal, 0.6-1.7 mm long, the tips sharp-pointed; lemmas lanceolate to oblong-elliptical, somewhat greyish, smooth, occasionally minutely rough near the tips, 1.2-2.1 mm long, somewhat longer than the glumes (up to 1/2 again as long), sharp-pointed, unawned or minutely awn-tipped; paleas lanceolate, smooth, 1.2-2.1 mm long, the tips sharp-pointed; anthers 1-1.3 mm long, greenish-yellow to purplish at maturity.
Moist to mesic alkaline meadows, seeps, and hot springs in the steppe and montane zones; infrequent in S BC east of the Coast-Cascade Mountains; E to ON and S to NY, PA, OH, IN, MI, 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)
