Elegia capensis inflorescence

Elegia capensis is dioecious like all plants of the Restionaceae family, i.e. pollen plants are separate from seed plants, depending upon the wind to carry the pollen from male plants to the female flowers hopefully growing not too far away and ready to receive pollen.

The flowers are small in both sexes, sepals and petals brown and scale-like. There are no nectaries as there is no point in motivating the wind by sweetness, the technique employed by so many flowering species for enticing insect and bird pollinators.

Flowers grow bunched together in small spikelets clustered along the elongated brown inflorescences. Male and female inflorescences are similar in appearance, occurring at culm tips, above the whorls of culm branches spaced at the nodes of main culms.

Pale, papery sheaths, persistent and triangular, are conspicuously protruding from the dense, dark spikelets (Dorrat-Haaksma and Linder, 2012).