Description:

• Perennial or annual, tufted, erect, often decumbent, rhizomatous
• Leaf blade linear, convolute at first, becoming expanded, gradually passing into sheath; ligule an unfringed to a fringed membrane
• Inflorescence of 2-many, terminal, spike-like, hairy (silky) racemes, digitate or subdigitate or scattered on a central axis, dense with spikelets closely packed; internodes and pedicels linear, slender; spikelets similar, in pairs, in long-short combinations: one sessile, the other pedicelled, pedicels free and hairy
• Spikelet dorsiventrally compressed, falling with glumes; glumes ± equal, dissimilar, hairy, usually awnless; lower glume concave to ± flattened, with inflexed margins, hairy or glabrous, nerveless or faintly 2- or 3-nerved, 2-keeled; upper glume often narrower, keeled, acute
• Florets 2; lower floret reduced to a lemma, sometimes a small scale or 0, awnless; upper floret bisexual; lemma less firm than glumes, hyaline, linear to cordate, 2-lobed, awnless or awned from between lobes; awn geniculate, twisted; callus obtuse, hairy; palea small, hyaline or 0
• Lodicules 2, fleshy
• Stamens 3
• Ovary glabrous; styles 2, plumose
• Caryopsis oblong
• x = 5, 10 (polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Eulalia Kunth
  • Kunth: 160 (1829)
  • Stapf: 324 (1898) under Pollinia Trin.
  • Chippindall: 485 (1955)
  • Clayton & Renvoize: 711 (1982)
  • Clayton & Renvoize: 333 (1986)
  • Gibbs Russell et al.: 166 (1990)
  • Watson & Dallwitz: 401 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 30, tropical and subtropical regions of Africa, Asia and Australia
• Southern Africa: Species 2, Mpumalanga, Swaziland to KwaZulu-Natal and southwards to Eastern Cape