Deschampsia elongata

Slender hair grass, Slender Hair Grass

Family: Poaceae · Type: perennial · Native

Slender hair grass is a California native perennial found in northwestern California, the high Cascade Range, Sierra Nevada, central western California, Transverse Ranges, Peninsular Ranges, and Great Basin in wet sites, meadows, lakeshores, and shaded slopes at elevations up to 3,100 meters. Flowering from May to September, this grass produces green to tan flowers with occasional purple tips in delicate, narrow clusters less than 1 centimeter wide. Growing in dense clumps with stems 10 to 70 centimeters tall, it forms graceful tufted clusters. Its leaves are flat to slightly rolled, 4 to 8 centimeters long and approximately 1 millimeter wide, with distinctive ligules 2 to 8 millimeters long that are acute to acuminate. The spikelets feature lemmas with an awn 1 to 5 millimeters long, generally straight and attached near the middle of the lemma.

Habitat: Wet sites, meadows, lakeshores, shaded slopes

Bloom period: May-Sep

Elevation: < 3100 m

Bioregions: NW, CaRH, SN, CW (exc SCoRI), TR, PR, GB (exc W&ampI)

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

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