Description :

• Tufted, grass-like annual, or usually perennial herbs
• Leaves flat, linear, with closed basal sheaths, inconspicuously silky-hairy
• Inflorescence of dense, terminal spikes, heads or panicles, subtended by 1-few leaf-like bracts
• Scapes long, furnished with reduced leaves or bracts, the upper subtending the inflorescence
• Flowers each subtended by a small membranous ciliate bract
• Perianth segments glumaceous
• Ovary unilocular, with 3, nearly basal ovules
• Capsule loculicidal
• Seeds few, ovoid to globose, with or without an apical or basal appendage
• x = 6 (3) (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Luzula DC.
  • Candolle: 158 (1805) name conserved
  • Brown: 27 (1897)
  • Carter: 7 (1966)
  • Friedrich-Holzhammer: 3 (1967)
  • Obermeyer: 91 (1985)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global : Species ± 80, mostly north temperate regions, rare in southern hemisphere
• Southern Africa : Species 1: Luzula africana Drège ex Steud., Namibia, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho and Eastern Cape, at fairly high altitudes