Elymus ciliaris

Illustrator: Cindy Roché, Annaliese Miller

Copyright: Utah State University

Plants loosely cespitose, without conspicuous rhizomes. Culms 30-130 cm tall, 1-5 mm thick, erect or weakly decumbent; nodes 3-4, glabrous, glaucous. Leaves basal and cauline; sheaths glaucous, glabrous or with hairs, lower sheaths sometimes hairy, upper sheaths glabrous, margins sometimes ciliate; auricles 1.5-2.5 mm; ligules about 0.3 mm; blades 10-25 cm long, 3-10 mm wide, glabrous or pilose. Spikes 10-22 cm long, 1.5-2.5 cm wide including the awns, 0.8-1 cm wide excluding the awns, inclined to nodding, with 1 spikelet at all or most nodes; rachises scabrous on the edges, glabrous below the spikelets; internodes 10-25 mm. Spikelets 5-22 mm long, about 5 mm wide, appressed, with 4-12 florets; disarticulation above the glumes, beneath the florets. Glumes narrowly elliptic to lance-oblong, apices acute to acuminate; lower glumes 5-11 mm; upper glumes 7-13 mm; lemmas 7-12 mm, mostly glabrous, glabrate, or sparsely hairy, margins with coarse stiff hairs, hairs to 1 mm, apices abruptly narrowed, awned, awns 10-20 mm, scabrous, strongly outcurved to recurved; paleas 2/3 - 4/5 the length of the lemmas, keels winged distally, distinctly outwardly curved below the apices, apices 0.5-0.6 mm wide, truncate to rounded; anthers about 2 mm. 2n = 28. Genome StY.

Discussion

Elymus ciliaris is native to northern China and Japan. It was collected from ballast dumps in Portland, Oregon, in 1899 and 1902; it is not established in the Flora region. A.S. Hitchcock identified both specimens on the sheet (US 1017954) as Agropyron caninum (L.) P. Beauv. [= Elymus caninus, p. 322], from which E. ciliaris differs in its short, rounded paleas and relatively short glumes with distinctly outwardly curving keels. The other specimen on that sheet is E. tsuskushiensis (p. 336).

Selected References

None.

Lower Taxa

None.