Apluda varia, Hack.
This is a tall leafy perennial grass with wiry roots. Stems are densely tufted, branched, geniculately ascending, erect or the branches scandent, solid, smooth and polished, 1 to 7 feet.
The leaf-sheath is glabrous or slightly hairy, the upper ones being shorter and dilated into spathes with subulate tips. The ligule is a short stiff slightly lacerate membrane.
The leaf-blade is linear-lanceolate, finely acuminate, base narrowed into a petiole, scaberulous on both the surfaces.
The inflorescence consists of simple spikes, each in a spathiform bract, and forming clusters terminating the stem and the branches. The spikes have their bases rounded and swollen and each spike consists of a sessile bisexual spikelet and two flat linear, truncate, parallel pedicels, one terminated by a spikelet, and the other by a solitary minute glume. Spathes are 1/8 to 1/3 inch long, sessile or pedicellate, green, cymbiform, with subulate tips.
Fig. 142.—Apluda varia.
A. A cluster of spikes containing five spikes with their spathes; B and C. spikes.
The sessile as well as the pedicelled spikelets have four glumes. The sessile spikelets are 1/8 to 1/5 inch long. The first glume is spreading or erect, chartaceous, many-nerved, two-toothed at the apex and with narrow hyaline margins from about the middle to the apex. The second glume is compressed, dorsally gibbous, keeled, 7-nerved. The third glume is hyaline, oblong-lanceolate, 3-nerved, paleate with three stamens; palea is narrow. The fourth glume is shorter than the third, deeply 2-fid and awned in the cleft, bisexual or female, 3- to 5-nerved below the cleft, the lateral nerves arching and meeting the mid-nerve just at the cleft, with a small ovate palea. There are two lodicules. The pedicelled spikelets are dorsally compressed. The first glume is lanceolate, oblong, subacute, many-nerved, coriaceous and glabrous. The second glume is as long as the first, many-nerved, lanceolate-oblong, coriaceous and glabrous. The third glume is hyaline, shorter than the second, 3-nerved, paleate and with three stamens. The fourth glume is shorter than or equal to the third, hyaline, 1-nerved rarely with two short lateral nerves, female or imperfect. Lodicules are two.