Perennial. Culms geniculately ascending, loose, up to 2 ft. or more high, terete, simple or branched at the base, slender, glabrous and smooth or shortly hairy and minutely tuberculate near the nodes, many-noded, with the nodes pilose to villous. Leaf-sheaths tight or becoming loose and exposing the culm, as long as or usually shorter than the internodes, finely striate, sparsely to densely hairy and rough from small pale tubercles; ligule reduced to a minutely ciliate rim; blade linear to lanceolate from a rounded or narrowed base, finely acute, 1 1/4–2 1/2 in. long, 2–3 lin. wide, flat, usually spreading, firm, rough and shortly hairy from numerous minute tubercles, rarely almost smooth. Panicle narrowly oblong to ovate in outline, 2–5 in. long, up to 1 1/2 in. wide, effuse or more or less contracted, pale; rhachis slender, pubescent at the nodes; branches solitary, erect or slightly spreading, branched at the base and upwards, glabrous; branchlets and pedicels flexuous, capillary, scaberulous, the latter 1/2–1 1/2 lin. long, with a few white hairs 1/2–1 lin. long from below their discoid tips. Spikelets oblong, 1 1/5–1 1/4 lin. long, about 1/2 lin. wide at the middle, pale straw-coloured, usually with purplish tips and sometimes suffused with purple, pilose with white hairs as long as the spikelet or exceeding the tip by up to 1/2 lin. Glumes approximate; lower oblong, obtuse, truncate or emarginate, 1/4– 2/5 lin. long, thinly membranous, nerveless, glabrous or sparsely pilose, encircled by a ring of white hairs from the base up to 1/2 lin. long; upper as long as the spikelet, narrowly oblong in profile, slightly gibbous in the lower two-thirds, obtusely and minutely 2-lobed, mucronate or with a bristle up to 3/4 lin. long from the sinus, firmly membranous, 5–7-nerved, shortly hairy from the base upwards, usually with a fringe of long appressed hairs arising from minute tubercles just above the middle, margins scabridulous. Lower floret barren: valve linear-oblong in profile, similar to the upper glume but slightly narrower and shorter, 5-nerved, with an awn up to 2 1/2 lin. long; valvule 0 or if present then often reduced and rarely up to 1 lin. long, linear, obtuse, thinly membranous, keels scabridulous. Upper floret hermaphrodite: valve elliptic-oblong when flattened, 1 lin. long, emarginate, very obscurely 3-nerved, glabrous, thinly membranous; anthers linear, 3/4 lin. long.
