perennial or annual or at least flowering the first year; rhizome short, oblique, covered with the remains of old scales and sheaths, sometimes with subglobose innovation buds; culms suberect or ascending, often geniculate, 2–6 ft. long, usually strongly compressed or even ancipitous below, strongly striate and scabrid or puberulous below the panicle, otherwise glabrous and smooth, 3–7-noded, internodes exserted except the lowest, uppermost usually very long and slender; sheaths striate, glabrous or softly hirsute, lower compressed, keeled, bases often persistent and breaking up into fibres; ligule a shortly and densely ciliate rim; blades linear, long tapering to an acute point, 1/2–1 1/2 ft. by 1 1/2–4 lin. or rarely 6 lin., flat, rather firm, sometimes rather rigid and more or less involute, glabrous or scantily hairy towards the base, scaberulous or almost smooth; panicle erect, straight or subflexuous, cylindric, 2 in. to more than 1 ft. long, 2 1/2–3 lin. thick (exclusive of the bristles), very dense, very bristly, usually orange-coloured or reddish; axis slender, minutely villous or puberulous; branches reduced to a subsessile one-sided involucre consisting of 6–10 slender scabrid bristles, 2–7 lin. long, yellowish to bright orange or reddish, and subtending usually 1 perfect and 1–2 arrested spikelets; spikelets obliquely ovate to ovate-oblong, subapiculate or obtuse, 1 1/4–1 1/2 lin. long, pallid or purplish at the tips, glabrous; glumes very thin, membranous, ovate, acute or subacute, whitish or purplish, lower 3-nerved, 1/3 as long as the spikelet, upper 5-nerved, 1/2 as long as the spikelet, nerves faint; lower floret ♂; valve equal or subequal to the spikelet, flat or depressed along the middle, similar to the upper glume; pale subequal to the valve; hermaphrodite floret equalling or slightly exceeding the ♂, plano-convex, oblong, usually minutely apiculate, pallid or purplish upwards; valve coriaceous, transversely wrinkled, 5-nerved; anthers 1/2–1 lin. long; grain depressed ellipsoid, 3/4 lin. long. null
