Poa wheeleri

Hooker's bluegrass

Family: Poaceae · Type: perennial · Native

Hooker's bluegrass is a California native perennial grass found in the Klamath Ranges, northern Coast Ranges, California Ranges, Sierra Nevada, and Great Basin mountains in open forest with rich soil at elevations of 1,300 to 3,800 meters. Flowering from May to August, this grass produces pale green to whitish flowers in sparse, open panicles 5 to 12 centimeters long. Growing with tufted stems 35 to 80 centimeters tall, emerging from short rhizomes and forming distinctive grass clumps. Its leaf blades are 1.5 to 3.5 millimeters wide, soft to somewhat firm, often folded or inrolled, with upper surfaces finely hairy. The plant reproduces asexually, with lemmas 3 to 6 millimeters long and glabrous to sparsely hairy surfaces.

Habitat: Common (especially SN), mountains, open forest in rich soil

Bloom period: May-Aug

Elevation: 1300-3800 m

Bioregions: KR, NCoRH, CaRH, SNH, GB

California counties: Mono, San Bernardino, Fresno, Plumas, Tulare, Tuolumne, Inyo, Modoc, Shasta, Placer, Amador, Alpine, Mariposa, Butte, Trinity, El Dorado, Madera, Nevada, Lassen, Siskiyou, Calaveras, Sierra, Lake, Del Norte, Riverside, Kern

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