Hordeum spontaneum

Hordeum spontaneum, wild barley, is an annual grass of the family Poaceae considered the wild progenitor of cultivated barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. vulgare) and now usually treated as Hordeum vulgare subsp. spontaneum. Plants are tufted, 30 to 100 centimetres tall, with narrow leaves slightly more slender than those of the cultivated form. The inflorescence is a flattened, two-rowed spike 4 to 10 centimetres long bearing long, rough, divergent awns up to 15 centimetres long. At each rachis node sits a triplet of one fertile sessile spikelet flanked by two sterile spikelets, but a critical wild-type feature is a brittle rachis that fractures readily at maturity into individual dispersal units, in contrast to the tough non-shattering rachis selected in the domesticate. Grains are hulled, slender and somewhat smaller than those of cultivated barley. The species is native to the Fertile Crescent and now occurs across the eastern Mediterranean, the Near East, Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia and parts of north-west Africa, on rocky slopes, fallow fields, roadsides and Mediterranean steppe.