General: Perennial, strongly tufted grass from fibrous roots; stems solid, more or less strongly grooved, mostly 30-70 (100) cm tall.
Leaves: Sheaths open, smooth except along the margins and especially at the throats where strongly fringed with fine woolly hairs; blades usually in-rolled, 2-4 (5) mm wide, mostly smooth but very strongly soft-hairy along the margins bordering the ligules, the collars with numerous, long, usually divergent hairs (1) 2-3 mm long; ligules 0.5-0.7 mm long.
Flowers: Inflorescence a moderately open, spikelike panicle, (9) 10-20 (30) cm long, generally partially included in the sheaths, the branches simple to again branched, usually stiffly ascending, bearing spikelets to near the base; spikelets 1-flowered; glumes sharp-pointed, unequal, the lower ones about 1 mm long, the upper ones about twice as long; lemmas sharp-pointed, 2-3 mm long, paleas nearly equal to the lemmas; lodicules fan-shaped, about 0.2 mm long; anthers 0.5-1 mm long.
Mesic to dry grasslands and shrublands in the steppe and montane zones; rare in SC and SE BC; E to SW PQ and NB and S to ME, MA, PA, NC, GA, MS, LA, 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)
