Vahlodea atropurpurea

Vahlodea atropurpurea, the mountain hairgrass, is a tufted perennial grass of the Poaceae with a circumboreal, arctic-alpine distribution extending across northern Eurasia, Iceland, Greenland and through subarctic and montane North America from Alaska and Yukon south along the Rocky Mountains, the Cascade Range and the Appalachians. It typically grows 10-60 cm tall, forming loose tussocks with slender, erect or geniculate culms and short, mostly basal, flat to involute leaf blades 1-4 mm wide and 3-10 cm long. The inflorescence is a slender, open, oval to pyramidal panicle 4-12 cm long, with capillary, often nodding branches bearing relatively few but conspicuous spikelets. Each spikelet is 4-6 mm long, broadly ovate, shining and characteristically dark purplish-brown to violet, containing two florets with smooth, faintly awned lemmas, the awn arising from below the middle and only slightly exceeding the glumes. It flowers in mid to late summer and inhabits damp meadows, stream banks, snow-bed communities and stony slopes from subalpine to alpine elevations.