Festuca octoflora

Festuca octoflora (synonym Vulpia octoflora), the sixweeks fescue, is a small, slender, tufted annual grass of the Poaceae native to most of North America, typically 8-30 cm tall and one of the earliest native annual grasses to mature in spring. Culms are erect or geniculate at the base, glabrous and unbranched above, with one to three sheaths and narrow blades. Leaf blades are flat to involute, very narrow, 1-10 cm long and 0.5-1.5 mm wide, glabrous to scaberulous; ligules are very short membranous rims about 0.2-0.4 mm long. The inflorescence is a slender, narrowly contracted panicle 1.5-10 cm long with appressed branches bearing relatively few short-pedicelled spikelets. Spikelets are 4-10 mm long excluding awns, containing 5-13 closely overlapping florets, laterally compressed and disarticulating above the glumes and between the florets at maturity. Glumes are unequal, lanceolate and acute, the upper distinctly longer than the lower. Lemmas are lanceolate, scabrous-puberulent, 3-6 mm long with a slender straight terminal awn 0.5-9 mm long, depending on variety. The species grows in dry sandy soils, sparsely vegetated openings, roadsides and rocky slopes from prairie to desert margins.