A small tufted grass of tropical and subtropical grassland, common in seasonally dry areas.
Schizachyrium brevifolium (family Poaceae) is a delicate annual grass with slender, tufted stems less than a millimetre thick. Its leaves are short, about 3 cm long and 2 mm wide, with flattened sheaths, and its flowers are carried on a single slender spike at the tip of each stem. The spikelets are in pairs: one is stalkless, about 3 mm long, with a twisted bristle (awn) rising from a deep notch at its tip, and the other is stalked and much reduced, about 1 mm long. As the plant matures, its leaves and sheaths turn rosy red. It was first described in 1788, as Andropogon brevifolius, from the West Indies; later names now included in it are Andropogon minimus, from Sierra Leone, and Schizachyrium fasciculatum, from Guinea.
It is widely distributed in the tropics of Africa, Asia and the Americas. Kew's Flora Zambesiaca records it in damp and waterlogged meadows, both grazed and ungrazed, on open sandy ground, along rivers and roads and on cultivated ground, at 500 to 1,530 metres, and the Flora of Taiwan records it in waste fields and on hillsides.
Note on sources: this entry describes the grass as common in seasonally dry areas. Kew records it mainly on damp and waterlogged ground, and the Flora of Taiwan calls it rather rare there.
Sources: PROTA4U database (Plant Resources of Tropical Africa), which compiles records from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques de Genève, FAO EcoCrop and other botanical databases.
Grazed by livestock and recorded in regional feed-composition databases as a forage grass.
A wild annual grass of open and lightly disturbed ground.