Dwarf feather grass

Stipa capillata is a densely tufted perennial bunchgrass of the Poaceae family, growing 40 to 100 centimetres tall, forming compact, hard tussocks from a fibrous root system, with erect, slender, glabrous culms. The narrowly involute, almost filiform, dark green to grey-green leaf blades are 20 to 50 centimetres long but less than 1 millimetre wide when rolled, scabrid on the inside, with smooth or sparsely hairy sheaths and a short, blunt membranous ligule. The narrow, sparingly branched panicle is 15 to 30 centimetres long, partly enclosed in the upper leaf sheath at flowering, with each branch bearing a single elongate spikelet 12 to 25 millimetres long. Each spikelet contains one fertile floret enclosed between two narrow, papery, long-pointed glumes and a hard, cylindrical, sharp-tipped lemma whose extended awn is one of the most distinctive features in the genus: 12 to 25 centimetres long, twisted in the lower part and bent, but unlike most Stipa species, glabrous and naked rather than feathery. Native to dry continental steppes, rocky hillsides and open xerophytic grasslands of central and eastern Europe and adjacent western Asia.