Swamp ricegrass

Leersia hexandra, commonly known as southern cutgrass, swamp rice grass or club-head cutgrass, is a sprawling perennial aquatic to semi-aquatic grass of the family Poaceae, native to the tropics and warm temperate regions of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australia, where it grows in marshes, swamps, slow-flowing streams, rice paddies and lake margins. The plant forms loose mats from long, slender, creeping rhizomes and stoloniferous rooting nodes that may form floating mats on still water. The culms are decumbent to ascending, 30–150 cm long, often rooting at the lower nodes, with glabrous nodes. The leaves are flat, 10–30 cm long and 4–10 mm wide, pale to mid-green, with scabrid margins that readily cut bare skin (hence the name 'cutgrass'). The inflorescence is an open panicle 5–15 cm long with slender, somewhat spreading branches bearing single-flowered, laterally compressed spikelets 3–5 mm long. The lemmas are stiff-ciliate on the keel and margins, and there are six stamens (an unusual number among grasses, giving the specific epithet). Flowering occurs throughout the warmer months.