Vasey grass

Paspalum urvillei, commonly known as Vaseygrass, is a tall coarse perennial grass in the family Poaceae native to subtropical and temperate South America from southern Brazil and Paraguay to Uruguay and northern Argentina, and widely naturalised in the southeastern United States, Mexico, southern Africa, southern Asia and Australia, where it grows in moist disturbed places, ditches, pasture margins and roadsides. The plant forms dense tufts 1 to 2 metres tall arising from short knotty rhizomes, with stout erect culms that are glabrous below and sometimes pilose at the nodes. The basal sheaths are conspicuously bearded with long stiff hairs at the collar and along the margins, a useful diagnostic character; the leaf blades are flat or folded, 20 to 50 centimetres long and 5 to 20 millimetres wide, with rough margins. The inflorescence is a terminal panicle 15 to 35 centimetres long bearing ten to twenty-five spreading to ascending unilateral racemes 5 to 15 centimetres long, the rachis of each racme bearing crowded pairs of small ovate spikelets in four ranks along one side, each spikelet about 2 to 3 millimetres long and fringed with long silky white hairs.