Agrostis pallens

Dune bent grass, Dune Bent Grass

Family: Poaceae · Type: perennial · Native

Dune bent grass is a California native perennial found in the California Floristic Province and Great Basin in open meadows, woodlands, forests, and subalpine areas at elevations of 200 to 3,500 meters. Flowering from June to August, this grass produces delicate, pale green to whitish flowers in open, lanceolate panicles 5 to 20 centimeters long. Growing 10 to 70 centimeters tall with occasionally spreading rhizomes, it forms loose, graceful clumps of slender stems. Its leaves have narrow blades 1.5 to 5 centimeters long, ranging from 1 to 6 millimeters wide, which can be flat or slightly rolled. The tiny spikelets feature glumes 2 to 3 millimeters long, with lemmas occasionally bearing a short, straight awn up to 2.5 millimeters in length.

Habitat: Common. Open meadows, woodland, forest, subalpine

Bloom period: Jun-Aug

Elevation: 200-3500 m

Bioregions: CA-FP, GB

California counties: San Diego, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Alpine, Amador, Butte, Contra Costa, Del Norte, El Dorado, Fresno, Humboldt, Inyo, Marin, Mariposa, Mendocino, Modoc, Napa, Orange, Plumas, Riverside, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Siskiyou, Tulare, Ventura, Alameda, Mono, Monterey, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Sierra, Placer, Nevada, Tuolumne, Lake, Kern, Sonoma, Lassen, Tehama, Trinity, Calaveras, Stanislaus, Sacramento, Solano, Shasta, San Joaquin

Data from The California Species Project — 14,000+ California species with verified data from CNPS, CDFW, USFWS, Jepson eFlora, Cal-IPC, and more.