Eragrostis amabilis, W. & A.
This is an annual tufted grass with slender, glabrous, erect or geniculately ascending stems, 6 to 18 inches, leafy chiefly at the base.
The leaf-sheath is glabrous and smooth. The ligule is absent or very obscure.
The leaf-blade is lanceolate-linear or linear, narrowed from a broad subcordate base to an acute tip, smooth and flat.
The panicle is ovoid-oblong or oblong, open or contracted, sparingly branched; branches are filiform, solitary, ramifying from near the base; rachis and nodes are glabrous.
Fig. 218.—Eragrostis amabilis.
1. A portion of a branch with spikelets; 2. a single spikelet; 3 and 4. empty glumes; 5. and 6. a flowering glume and its palea; 7. lodicules, stamens and ovary; 8. grain.
The spikelets are ovate-oblong or linear-oblong, pale or purplish 1/6 to 1/2 inch, up to 50-flowered, rachilla is tough with very short internodes. The glumes are very closely and distichously imbricating (and hence spikelets are pretty); the empty glumes are subequal, ovate-lanceolate, acute or cuspidately acuminate, 1-nerved, 1/25 to 1/16 inch long. Flowering glumes are broadly ovate or suborbicular, mucronulate, punctulate, with the lateral nerves equidistant from the margins and the median nerve, and produced far up towards the median nerve; palea is broad, shorter than its glume, deciduous with it, and with winged and scabrid keels. Stamens are three. Grain is obovoid-ellipsoid, smooth, laterally compressed, reddish-brown.