Southern Wetland Flora
Field Office Guide to Plant Species
Paspalum plicatulum Michx.
- Family: Grass (Poaceae)
- Flowering: May-July
- Field Marks: The distinguishing features of this Paspalum are the spikelets borne in pairs, fruits shiny brown with transverse wrinkles on the sterile lemma, and the perennial habit.
- Habitat: Moist to dry roadsides, pineland depressions, savannas, wet fields, flatwoods, prairies.
- Habit: Tufted perennial grass with short rhizomes.
- Stems: Upright, slender, smooth, up to 2 1/2 feet tall.
- Leaves: Elongated, usually inrolled along the edges, up to 1/5 inch wide, smooth on the upper surface, smooth or hairy on the lower surface; leaf sheaths smooth or sparsely hairy.
- Flowers: Borne in spikelets, with several spikelets in pairs and borne in 4 rows on one side of the rachis; racemes 2-6 per stem, up to 2 1/2 inches long.
- Spikelets: 1-flowered, ellipsoid, rounded at the tip, smooth, up to 1/8 inch long.
- Sepals: 0.
- Petals: 0.
- Stamens: 3.
- Pistils: Ovary superior.
- Grains: Ellipsoid, yellowish.
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Next Species -- Vasey Grass (Paspalum urvillei)
