Agrostis scabra

Rough bent grass

Family: Poaceae · Type: perennial · Native

Rough bent grass is a native perennial grass found in the Klamath Ranges, northern California Coast Ranges, Sierra Nevada, Transverse Ranges, San Jacinto Mountains, and eastern Sierra Nevada in open roadsides, meadows, and conifer forest at elevations of 100 to 3,500 meters. Flowering from July to September, this grass produces delicate, pale greenish-white flower clusters in open, arching panicles 8 to 25 centimeters long. Growing 20 to 75 centimeters tall with ascending to erect stems, it forms loose, open clumps with fine, thread-like branches. Its mostly basal leaves are narrow and finely scabrous, with blades 4 to 14 centimeters long and 1 to 3 millimeters wide, featuring ligules 2 to 5 millimeters in length. The grass produces small spikelets with lemmas that may occasionally have a short, straight awn less than 2 millimeters long.

Habitat: Open roadsides, meadows, conifer forest

Bloom period: Jul-Sep

Elevation: 100-3500 m

Bioregions: KR, NCoR, SN, TR, SnJt, SNE

California counties: San Bernardino, Alpine, Butte, El Dorado, Fresno, Inyo, Lake, Lassen, Los Angeles, Mariposa, Modoc, Mono, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Riverside, Shasta, Siskiyou, Tulare, Tuolumne, Madera, Sierra, San Diego, Amador, Yuba, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Calaveras, Kern, Tehama, Humboldt, Sonoma, Trinity, Del Norte, Ventura, Stanislaus, Sacramento

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