Description:

• Annual, sometimes perennial, delicate, mostly rambling or creeping, rooting at lower nodes
• Leaf blade linear to lanceolate, narrowed at base, often with a false petiole, expanded; ligule an unfringed membrane
• Inflorescence terminal, open, of slender, spike-like, digitate to subdigitate racemes, spikelets loosely spaced; internodes and pedicels linear, rarely inflated; spikelets usually similar, in pairs, one sessile, the other pedicelled, pedicels free of rachis
• Sessile spikelet dorsiventrally compressed, falling with glumes, linear-lanceolate, bearded at base with a ring of white hairs; glumes ± equal, dissimilar; lower glume narrow, acute or notched at tip, shallowly concave on back to medianly grooved, margins sharply inflexed; upper glume weakly keeled or rounded on back, acute
• Florets 2; lower floret male or sterile, reduced to a linear-lanceolate, hyaline, nerveless scale or suppressed (often mixed on same inflorescence), awnless; upper floret bisexual; lemma less firm than glumes, hyaline, linear to cordate, often minute, narrow, 1-nerved, minutely 2-lobed, awned from between lobes; awn hair-like, flexuous, glabrous; callus obtuse, hairy; palea much reduced or 0
• Lodicules 2, cuneate
• Stamens 2 or 3
• Ovary oblong-elliptic, glabrous
• Caryopsis ellipsoid to lanceolate, dorsally flattened

• Pedicelled spikelet similar to sessile spikelet
• x = 10 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Microstegium Nees
  • Nees ab Esenbeck: 447 (1836)
  • Stapf: 326 (1898) under Pollinia Trin.
  • Chippindall: 484 (1955)
  • Clayton & Renvoize: 715 (1982)
  • Clayton & Renvoize: 335 (1986)
  • Gibbs Russell et al.: 220 (1990)
  • Watson & Dallwitz: 605 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 15, tropical Asia and Africa but possibly introduced there
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Microstegium nudum (Trin.) A.Camus, northern provinces of South Africa, KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape