Triticum aestivum

Common wheat

Family: Poaceae · Type: annual · Not Native

Common wheat is a naturalized annual found in northern coastal, Sacramento Valley, central western, southwestern, and desert California regions in disturbed places like roadsides at elevations generally below 500 meters. Flowering from April to July, this plant produces small, clustered spikelets with whitish to pale green flowers. Growing with robust, dense stems 60 to 150 centimeters tall, it forms thick tufted clumps characteristic of cereal grasses. Its long leaves are broad, measuring 10 to 60 centimeters in length with distinctive claw-like appendages, and feature blades 10 to 15 millimeters wide. The mature plant develops prominent spikelets with toothed glumes and lemmas that can be awned up to 12 centimeters long.

Habitat: Escaped cereal crop along roadsides and in disturbed places

Bloom period: Apr-Jul

Elevation: generally < 500 m

Bioregions: NCoR, ScV, CW, SW, D

California counties: Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, Tulare, San Bernardino, Colusa, San Diego, Orange, Riverside, San Francisco, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Yolo, Lassen, Kern, Imperial, Placer, Amador, Yuba, Nevada, Sacramento, Solano, Sutter, Modoc, Calaveras, Contra Costa, El Dorado, Fresno, Marin, Merced, Monterey, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Shasta, Sonoma, Tuolumne, Butte, Plumas, San Luis Obispo, Glenn, Humboldt, Tehama, Alameda, Mendocino, Madera, Stanislaus, Mariposa

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