Flora of New Zealand Series

barley grass

Lower leaf-sheaths with ± dense, long, soft hairs. Leaf-blade 2-22 cm × 1.5-8 mm. Racemes erect, green to purplish, sometimes dark brown at maturity; rachis margins long hairy. Central spikelet ⚥, on glabrous pedicel 0.5-1 mm; lateral spikelets on shortly pubescent pedicels, 1-1.5 mm. Lateral spikelets: outer glumes 17-24 mm, inner 15-18 mm and with long hairy margins near base; lemma abaxially glabrous and straw-coloured below, green and more distinctly nerved and scabrid on nerves above, awn 11-27 mm; palea adaxially villous; lodicules 2.5 mm, hairy; anthers 0.8-1.6 mm. Central spikelet: lemma smooth but sparsely scabrid below awn, pale whitish green, greenish to purplish above, awn 18-30 mm, ± reaching to top of awns of lateral spikelets; palea keels with a few prickle-teeth near rounded, produced or bifid, ciliate apex, interkeel long hairy, adaxially short-ciliate. Anthers 0.8-1 mm.

N.: throughout except in Taranaki; S.: throughout except in Westland, Fiordland and Southland, and rare in Otago; St.; K. In depleted tussock grassland, pasture, waste land and roadsides, occasionally in cereal crops.

Naturalised from Mediterranean and Asia.

The correct name in Hordeum is H. murinum subsp. leporinum (Link) Arcang., Comp. Fl. Ital. 805 (1882).