Poa keckii

Keck's blue grass

Family: Poaceae · Type: perennial · Native

Keck's blue grass is a California native perennial found in the high alpine regions of the Sierra Nevada and eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains, including the Sweetwater and White Mountains, at elevations above 3,000 meters. Flowering from July to September, this plant produces small pale flowers in delicate, narrow inflorescences 1.5 to 6 centimeters long. Growing as a dense, tufted grass with stems 3 to 10 centimeters tall, it forms compact clumps in exposed high-elevation terrain. Its leaves are narrow and firm, typically 1 to 2 millimeters wide, tightly folded or rolled, with leaf sheaths open along most of their length. The grass produces small lemmas 3 to 5 millimeters long, with delicate anthers less than 2 millimeters in length.

Habitat: High alpine, often on open ground

Bloom period: Jul-Sep

Elevation: > 3000 m

Bioregions: SNH, SNE (Sweetwater, White mtns).

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