Poa tenerrima

Delicate blue grass

Family: Poaceae · Type: perennial · Native

Delicate blue grass is a California native perennial found in the Sierra Nevada Foothills in thin, drying serpentine soils within pine-oak forests at elevations below 700 meters. Flowering from March to June, this delicate grass produces soft pale green to bluish-green flowers in open, widely spreading inflorescences. Growing with slender, tufted stems 15 to 50 centimeters tall, it forms dense clusters of fine, soft stems. Its leaves are extremely narrow, measuring just 0.5 to 1.5 millimeters wide, with open sheaths and very short ligules less than 2.5 millimeters long. The grass produces small spikelets with lemmas that are weakly keeled and sparsely hairy near the base.

Habitat: Thin, drying soils, on serpentine in pine-oak forests

Bloom period: Mar-Jun

Elevation: < 700 m

Bioregions: SNF.

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