South Island: Brackish-water marshes on the south coast of Otago, Kirk! Petrie! Stewart Island: East Coast, local, Kirk!
Easily distinguished from the preceding by the stouter habit, denser panicle with shorter branches, smaller pale whitish-green spikelets with fewer florets, much larger empty glumes, and narrower and more pointed flowering glumes.
30. FESTUCA, Linn.
Perennial or rarely annual grasses. Leaves flat or complicate or convolute, often setaceous; ligules scarious. Spikelets 2- to many-flowered, arranged in open or contracted often unilateral panicles; rhachilla disarticulating above the two outer glumes and between the flowering glumes. Two outer glumes unequal or subequal, empty, persistent, more or less keeled, 1–3-nerved. Flowering glumes lanceolate, acute or acuminate or awned, rounded on the back or slightly keeled towards the tip, herbaceous, 5–7-nerved; awn from the tip or close to it, straight; callus glabrous or nearly so. Palea 2-keeled, more or less 2-toothed, scabrid or ciliolate along the keels. Lodicules 2. Stamens 3. Ovary glabrous or mmutely hairy at the tip; styles distinct, very short; stigmas plumose. Grain enclosed within the slightly hardened flowering glume and palea and often adherent to the latter, oblong, concave or grooved in front; hilum long, linear.
A genus of about 90 species, mainly found in the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, not so abundant in the south temperate zone, absent in the tropics except on high mountains. It differs from Atropis in the long linear hilum, and from Poa in the same character and in the flowering glumes being, more or less rounded on the back and often awned.
| * Flowering glumes not awned. | |
| Culms 1½–3 ft., forming dense hard tussocks. Panicle 2–9 in. Spikelets turgid, ½–¾ in. long | 1. F. littoralis. |
| ** Flowering glumes awned; awn much shorter than the glume. | |
| Culms 6–18 in., without creeping stolons, innovation-shoots intravaginal with the sheaths open or closed. Leaves usually setaceous; ligules biauricled. Spikelets 4–7-flowered | 2. F. ovina. |
| Culms 9–18 in., usually stoloniferous; innovation-shoots both intravaginal and extravaginal; sheaths always closed. Stem-leaves often broader; ligules not obviously biauricled. Spikelets 4–8-flowered | 3. F. rubra. |
| Culms 6–9 in., densely tufted. Leaves strict, erect, complicate or terete. Panicle spike like. Spikelets 2–3-flowered; empty glumes ⅓ the length of the spikelet | 4. F. contracta. |
| *** Flowering glumes awned; awn as long or longer than the glume. | |
| Culms 6–18 in., densely tufted, stoloniferous. Leaves soft, pliant, terete. Panicle narrow, spiciform. Spikelets 3–5-flowered | 5. F. Coxi. |
