Feather finger grass

Chloris virgata, commonly known as feather fingergrass or feathertop Rhodes grass, is a tufted annual grass in the family Poaceae with a near-cosmopolitan distribution across the warmer regions of the world, occurring widely in Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas as both a native and a naturalised plant of disturbed ground, roadsides, cultivated fields and overgrazed rangeland. The plant grows in erect to geniculately ascending tufts 20 to 100 centimetres tall, with slender, glabrous culms rooting at the lower nodes. Leaves are flat to folded, 5 to 25 centimetres long and 2 to 6 millimetres wide, with smooth or scabrous margins and a short membranous ligule. The inflorescence is a terminal cluster of four to twenty digitately arranged spike-like racemes 3 to 10 centimetres long forming a feathery silver-white to pale tawny head. Spikelets are crowded along one side of the rachis, each bearing one fertile and one or two sterile florets, and are conspicuously long-awned and clothed with silky white hairs that give the inflorescence its characteristic plumose appearance.