Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Small to medium-sized perennials or annuals.

Stems: Culms slender, not nodose above the leafy base.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Leaves basal, alternate/spiraling. Blades elongate and linear, or reduced to bladeless sheaths, usually flat, rarely ensiform. Margins entire. Sheathing; ligule a fringe of short hairs or a membranous projection, or absent. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in a terminal, simple or compound anthelate inflorescence, occasionally congested in a head or in a single terminal spikelet, the inflorescences subtended by 1 to few ± leafy involucral bracts; spikelets usually ovoid, terete (cylindrical) or laterally compressed; glumes numerous, spirally imbricate, or all or some 2-ranked, all alike and bearing an axillary perfect flower. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Calyx (sepals) absent. Corolla (petals) absent. Stamens 2–3. Ovary superior; styles filiform or dorsiventrally flattened, and then the margins often fimbriate, the style base thickened and jointed, and the style deciduous from the mature achene; stigmas 2–3.

Fruit: Achenes trigonous or lenticular; smooth or cancellate; bearing a stipe-like or inconspicuous gynophore. Seeds 1; seed coat thin; free from pericarp; embryo basal; endosperm abundant.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: