Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Tufted perennial herbs.

Stems: Stems terete (cylindrical) or slightly compressed, 2–8 dm long, 2–4 mm in diameter.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Primarily basal. Blades strongly laterally compressed, toward the apex nearly terete (cylindrical), with complete but weak septa, 8–16 cm long, 1–4 mm wide. Margins entire. Sheaths with hyaline margins prolonged into soft auricles 1–2 mm long. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers 5–30 in inflorescences of 3–50 broadly obpyramidal glomerules 5–10 mm wide on divaricating branches, forming sparse or dense compound cymes, lowest bract leaflike, inconspicuous, with a greatly contracted blade, up to 3 cm long, much longer than sheath, each flower subtended by 1 bracteole with midrib extended into a long bristle tip, sometimes as long as the perianth. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Perianth parts greenish to reddish brown, especially toward the apex, outer ones longer than inner ones, the inner ones ca. 3 mm long, the outer ones ca. 4 mm long, slightly longer to equaling the capsule, apex longacuminate, the glomerule thus appearing bristly (the perianth parts of a single flower or entire glomerule sometimes greatly proliferated as a result of parasitic infestation). Stamens 3; anthers longer than filaments. Pollen grains remaining in tetrads, surrounded by a common exine. Ovary superior, carpels 1.

Fruit: Capsules brown to reddish; shiny; with parietal placentas on lower ½; narrowly prismatic; apex mucronate. Seeds ca. 0.5 mm long and 0.25 mm wide; broadly cylindrical with dark apiculate ends.

Ploidy: 2n = 40

Habitat: Naturalized and sometimes locally abundant in wet sites on Maui and Hawai'i.

Elevation Range: