Habit: 		Low diffuse and extensively creeping perennial, with scaly rhizomes and long, strong, flat stolons.
Culms: 		Flowering culms 10-30 cm. tall or taller, erect, smooth and glabrous, flattened, wiry.
Blades: 	2.5-5 cm. long, 1-4 mm. wide, flat, rigid, smooth beneath, scabrous above, villous at base near ligule,
		often conspicuously 2-ranked.
Sheaths: 	Crowded at the base of the culm and along stolons, mostly glabrous.
Ligule: 	A conspicuous ring of white hairs.
Inflorescence: 	Spikes 3-8, purple, 1.5-5 cm. long, rachis flat.
Spikelets: 	2 mm. long, numerous, imbricated, flattened, in slender digitate spikes, sessile in two rows on
		one side of the slender, continuous rachis, 1-flowered, laterally compressed, awnless, rachilla
		disarticulating above the glumes and prolonged behind the palea as a slender, naked bristle, sometimes
		bearing a rudimentary lemma.
Glumes: 	Narrow, acuminate, 1-nerved, about equal, 1.5 mm. long, hispid on the keel, the first shorter
		than the second, two thirds as long as the lemma.
Lemmas: 	Firm, strongly compressed, about 2 mm. long, broad, boat-shaped, acute, ciliate on the keel, the
		lateral nerves close to the margins.
Palea: 		About as long as its lemma, ciliate on the prominent keels.
Floret: 	Stigmas purple, stamens 3.
Fruit: 		Grain free, within the lemma and palea.
Habitat: 	Fields and waste places, lawns. July-September.
Use: 		Often used as a lawn grass.  In southeastern United States, it is the most important
		pasture grass.