Lolium pratense, meadow fescue is a perennial species of grass, which is often used as an ornamental in gardens, and is also an important forage crop.
It grows in meadows, roadsides, old pastures, and riversides on moist, rich soils, especially on loamy and heavy soils.
Most publications have used the names Festuca pratensis or, more recently, Schedonorus pratensis for this species, but DNA studies appear to have settled a long debate that it should be included within the genus Lolium instead.
Description
The inflorescence is a panicle.
Meadow fescue is a tuft-forming perennial (called a bunchgrass in the US), with erect to spreading hollow flowering stems up to about 1 m (3 ft) tall (exceptionally up to 120 cm) which are quite hairless (glabrous), including the leaf sheaths. At the top of the sheath is a short (1 mm) ligule and pointed auricles that can wrap slightly around the stem. The leaf blade is flat, up to about 8 mm wide, and also glabrous, but rough on the top and the margins. The tillers (non-flowering stems) are typically shorter but otherwise similar to the culms.
The leaf sheath, blade and auricles are glabrous
Flowering typically occurs from June until August, with an erect to slightly nodding open panicle about 30 cm (1 ft) long, which is more-or-less one-sided. The branches are normally in pairs, the shorter of which bears only 1 or 2 spikelets, whereas the larger one has 4 or more. The spikelets are 11–17 mm long and comprise 5-10 (sometimes up to 16) bisexual florets and two short, unequal glumes. The lower glume has only 1 nerve whereas the upper one has up to 3. The lemmas are awnless or just shortly pointed. Each floret has 3 stamens with anthers about 3 mm long. The fruit is a nut or caryopsis with the seed tightly enclosed by the hardened lemma and palea.
Identification
It is most similar to tall fescue, from which it differs by having only 2 spikelets on the smaller branch at the lowest panicle node and...
