Mat-grass fescue

Vulpia unilateralis, commonly known as mat-grass fescue and at times included in the genus Festuca, is a small, slender, tufted annual grass of the family Poaceae native to the Mediterranean basin, western and central Asia and parts of central and southern Europe, growing on dry stony hillsides, open grassland, fallow fields, roadsides and other disturbed sunny ground. The plant typically grows 5 to 25 centimetres tall, with thin geniculately ascending culms arising in small loose tufts from a fine fibrous root system. The narrow leaf blades are flat to inrolled, 1 to 8 centimetres long and only about 1 millimetre wide, glabrous to scaberulous, with a very short truncate membranous ligule. The inflorescence is a stiff, narrowly cylindrical, often one-sided spike-like raceme or contracted panicle 1 to 6 centimetres long, the short erect branches each bearing a few three- to seven-flowered spikelets. Each lemma is narrowly lanceolate and tapers into a short straight terminal awn 1 to 4 millimetres long; the upper glume is conspicuously longer than the lower.