Hordeum vulgare

Barley, Barley

Family: Poaceae · Type: annual · Not Native

Barley is a naturalized annual found in the California Floristic Province in disturbed areas as an escape from cultivation, at elevations below 3,100 meters. Flowering throughout the year, this plant produces green to purple or nearly black flowers in dense, erect to nodding inflorescences 5 to 10 centimeters long. Growing with stout, erect stems 50 to 140 centimeters tall, it has smooth nodes and leaf blades up to 30 centimeters long and 5 to 15 millimeters wide. Its leaves have glabrous sheaths with tiny auricles and a short ligule less than 3 millimeters long. The plant can develop awns 30 to 180 millimeters long on its lemmas, giving the mature plant a distinctive appearance.

Habitat: Disturbed areas as an escape from cultivation, not persisting

Bloom period: All year

Elevation: < 3100 m

Bioregions: CA-FP

California counties: Los Angeles, Tulare, Santa Cruz, Ventura, Monterey, Santa Clara, Sonoma, San Bernardino, Riverside, San Luis Obispo, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Madera, San Mateo, Orange, Sacramento, Calaveras, Kern, El Dorado, Inyo, Mariposa, Merced, Napa, Plumas, Siskiyou, Sutter, Tuolumne, Alameda, San Francisco, Marin, Butte, Fresno, Colusa, Alpine, Mendocino, Lake, Shasta, Humboldt, Yolo, Del Norte, Mono, Solano, San Joaquin, Placer, Imperial

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