Deschampsia danthonioides

Annual hair grass

Family: Poaceae · Type: annual · Native

Annual hair grass is a California native annual found in California Floristic Province (excluding Tehama and northern Channel Islands), Modoc Plateau, and eastern Mojave Desert in moist to drying open sites, meadows, streambanks, and vernal pools at elevations up to 2,750 meters. Flowering from March to August, this delicate grass produces pale green to purplish spikes with spikelets featuring purple-tipped glumes. Growing with slender stems 12 to 60 centimeters tall, it forms loosely clustered bunches with fine, narrow leaves. Its basal leaves are generally 1 to 9 centimeters long and 1 to 2 millimeters wide, typically inrolled and glabrous with short ligules. The distinctive awned spikelets have lemmas 2 to 3 millimeters long, with bent awns 4 to 9 millimeters extending below the middle of the lemma.

Habitat: Moist to drying, open sites, meadows, streambanks, vernal pools, occasionally in alkali soil

Bloom period: Mar-Aug

Elevation: < 2750 m

Bioregions: CA-FP (exc Teh, n ChI), MP, DMoj (uncommon)

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

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