This is a perennial grass with short underground branches covered with scales. Stems are many, tufted, slender, creeping and rooting, or ascending and suberect, simple or branched, 6 to 20 inches long and leafy and leaves bifarious and divaricate.
Leaf-sheaths are hairy or glabrous, compressed, keeled. The ligule is a short membrane. Nodes are glabrous.
Leaf-blades are broadly lanceolate or linear-lanceolate, acute, spreading, flat, or in short-leaved forms, stiff and pungent, 1 to 2 inches long (rarely also 5 inches long), glabrous above and below, ciliate at the margins towards the base, and with a very minutely serrate hyaline margin.
The inflorescence consists of two to four terminal spikes with a slender, long, hairy or glabrous peduncle. The spikes are slender, erect or spreading with fine winged glabrous rachis.
The spikelets are small, 1/20 to 1/14 inch, geminate, one short and the other long pedicelled, appressed to the rachis, elliptic, silky with slender crisped hairs, pale green or purplish.
Fig. 77.—Digitaria longiflora.
1. A portion of the spike; 2. the first glume; 3 and 4. the second and third glumes; 5 and 6. the fourth glume and its palea; 7. lodicules, ovary and stamens.
There are three glumes with a rudimentary first glume. The first glume is very minute and hyaline. The second glume is as long as the third, membranous, 5-nerved (rarely 3- to 7-nerved), silkily hairy. The third glume is similar to the second and usually 7-nerved (rarely 3- to 5-nerved). The fourth glume is sub-chartaceous, ovate-oblong, paleate, slightly shorter than the third glume, pale brown, smooth. There are two small lodicules. Styles are long and purple.
This grass grows in cultivated dry fields. It seems to like a sandy loamy soil.