Description :

• Perennial, submerged or floating, rooting from submerged nodes
• Culms terete, glabrous, spongy
• Leaf blade linear, broad, flat, tapering to a fine point, glaucous; ligule a fringed membrane
• Inflorescence of 1-many, pale green or straw-coloured racemes, digitate to subdigitate on a short axis; racemes erect, flattened, rigid or slightly nodding, stout; internodes and pedicels stout, thickened, disarticulating transversely at joints but rachis not very fragile, pedicels free; spikelets paired, in long-short combinations: one sessile, the other pedicelled
• Sessile spikelet 20-40 mm long, dorsiventrally compressed, flat or slightly rounded across back, falling with glumes; glumes unequal (if awn is taken into consideration), dissimilar; lower glume flat on back, 2-keeled, scrabrid on keels, narrowly winged above, drawn out into a long, flattened, awn-like tail; upper glume boat-shaped
• Florets 2; lower floret male; lemma hyaline, 2-nerved, awnless; palea present, hyaline; upper floret bisexual; lemma less firm than glumes, hyaline, entire, awnless; callus truncate; palea 2-nerved
• Lodicules 2, large, fleshy, broadly cuneate, glabrous
• Stamens 3
• Ovary glabrous; style branches 2, plumose

• Pedicelled spikelet similar to but smaller than sessile spikelet, bisexual or male only
• x = 10

Nomenclature:

• Vossia Wall. & Griff.
  • Wallich & Griffith: 572 (1836) name conserved, not of Adanson: 619 (1763)
  • Stapf: 51 (1917)
  • Clayton & Renvoize: 831 (1982)
  • Clayton & Renvoize: 363 (1986)
  • Gibbs Russell et al.: 353 (1990)
  • Watson & Dallwitz: 1001 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species 1: Vossia cuspidata (Roxb.) Griff., tropical Africa and India
• Southern Africa : Namibia (Caprivi) and N Botswana