Eragrostis brownii

Eragrostis brownii, commonly known as Brown's lovegrass, is a tufted perennial grass in the family Poaceae, subfamily Chloridoideae, native to Australia, New Zealand and parts of the southwestern Pacific. It forms compact, erect clumps generally 20 to 60 cm tall, with culms that may root at the lower nodes. Leaf blades are flat to inrolled, fine and somewhat glaucous, with a fringe of short hairs in place of a true ligule. The inflorescence is an open, narrowly pyramidal panicle 5 to 15 cm long, bearing numerous small, laterally compressed spikelets of three to ten florets that are typically dark grey-green and shed their lemmas at maturity. The species occurs widely in open eucalypt woodland, grassland, roadsides and disturbed sandy or skeletal soils, persisting through drought by dying back to the basal tuft. It was named in honour of the Scottish botanist Robert Brown, who first collected the species during early nineteenth-century Australian exploration.