Glaucous Fescue - Festuca glauca
Favourite Photos
| image | species | author | location | uploaded | taken | select |
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Glaucous Fescue - Festuca glauca | dylan | Bristol | 25 Sep 2024, 9:15 p.m. | 26 May 2022, 6:15 p.m. |
Species Description
Widely grown in gardens and sometimes escapes and becomes naturalised.
Stace 4:
Festuca glauca Vill. - Glaucous Fescue.
Culms to 40cm; leaves strongly glaucous, 0.69-1mm from midrib to edge, with 7(-9) veins and 2(-4) adaxial grooves, with abaxial sclerenchyma in continuous or largely continuous band; panicles 2.7-5cm, dense; pedicels 0.3-0.8mm; spikelets 5.7-6.7mm; lemmas 3.5-4.6mm, with awns 0.6-1.7mm; (2n=42). Neophyte-naturalised; much grown as ornamental in parks and by roads, often self-sowing in marginal ground; scattered in lowland England and Scotland, County Wexford; South West France.
Key:
- Ovary ellipsoid to oblong, adherent to palea, usually glabrous, if with hairy apex then culm leaves flat; most of lemma width green, not translucent; leaves without sharp apices; leaves ≤0.5mm
- Young leaves on tillers with sheaths not fused near apex but with overlapping margins; all tillers intravaginal (5-13. F. ovina agg.)
- Leaves with 5-9 veins, with 4(-6) adaxial grooves; lemmas with awns usually >1.2mm and often >1.6mm
- Pedicels 0.3-1.8mm; spikelets 5.4-7mm; lemmas with awns 0.5-1.5mm; leaves usually very glaucous, with abaxial sclerenchyma in ≥5 main islets (at midrib, edges and variously in between) to more or less continuous
- Pedicels 0.3-0.5(0.8)mm; sheaths hairy; leaf-blade sclerenchyma in unbroken or largely unbroken band