A tufted perennial. Culms erect or geniculately ascending, up to 3 ft. high, slender to moderately stout, simple or sometimes branched, terete, glabrous and smoth, 2–3-noded, the uppermost internode (peduncle) up to 1 1/2 ft. long. Leaf-sheaths finely striate, the lower persistent, densely villous or glabrescent at the base and sparingly hairy from minute tubercles upwards, the upper mostly glabrous; ligule obtuse to rotundate-truncate, scarious, glabrous, up to 3 lin. long; blade linear from a narrowed base, long and finely acute, up to 15 in. long and 3 1/2 lin. wide, flat, glabrous, glaucous, slightly scaberulous, margins cartilaginous and crinkled. False spikes cylindric, dense, 4–7 in. long, up to 3 1/2 lin. wide, slender to stout, straw-coloured or purplish; rhachis slender, wavy, minutely pubescent to glabrous, triquetrous or angular; branches reduced to minute stumps; clusters oblong, up to 2 lin. wide, composed of up to 10 spikelets, villous at the base. Spikelets 4–5 lin. long. Lower glume as long as the spikelet, free almost to the base, lanceolate, mostly setaceously acuminate or sometimes acuminate, coriaceous, pubescent to villous, 3–8-nerved, or in the inner spikelets of a cluster reduced to a linear-subulate 1-nerved scale; upper setaceously subulate from a short broadly ovate base, up to 2 lin. long, hyaline, 1-nerved, ciliate or ciliolate. Lower floret: valve lanceolate-oblong, acute, up to 2 3/4 lin. long, hyaline, 5–7-nerved, puberulous, ciliate on the margins above the middle with tubercle-based hairs up to 1/2 lin. long. Upper floret hermaphrodite or ♂: valve lanceolate, acute, up to 2 3/4 lin. long, at length thinly chartaceous, glabrous, finely scaberulous upwards, 3-nerved; valvule as long as the valve; anthers 1 lin. long. Caryopsis elliptic-oblong, about 1 lin. long.
