Heteropogon contortus, spear grass

The long thin spears of Heteropogon contortus, each a raceme of many spikelets and a coherent bunch of long, dark, velvety awns above them, stand separately here. Maybe too few or too young to tangle into each other, or the wind simply hasn’t blown them about to touch each other yet.

Only some spikelets in a raceme are awned. One of every pair of spikelets up the raceme is stalked (Van Oudtshoorn, 1991; Vlok and Schutte-Vlok, 2010; Lowrey and Wright, 1987).