Description:

• Perennial or annual, tufted, often aromatic
• Leaf blade folded or flat; ligule a very short, fringed membrane or a fringe of hairs
• Inflorescence a solitary spike-like raceme, terminal or sometimes axillary forming a spatheate, leafy false panicle, racemes flexuous, dorsally flattened, internodes columnar to subclavate; joints oblique; spikelets in pairs, secund, in long-short combinations: one sessile, the other pedicelled, pedicels free of rachis
• Sessile spikelet 5-15 mm long, lanceolate, dorsiventrally compressed, falling with glumes, hairy, sometimes sparsely hairy; glumes ± equal to unequal, dissimilar, awned to awnless; lower glume laterally 2-keeled, keels not winged, hairy or glabrous, usually bordered by a brown oil streak, entire or with a cuspidate to bifid tip; upper glume lanceolate, acute, membranous, 1-keeled, usually hairy
• Florets 2; lower floret sterile, reduced to hyaline lemma; upper floret bisexual; lemma hyaline, less firm in texture than glumes, awnless; callus cuneate, large, hairy, hairs white or silver, less than half spikelet length; palea minute or 0
• Lodicules 2, cuneate, fleshy, glabrous
• Stamens 3
• Ovary glabrous; styles plumose above
• Caryopsis ellipsoid, dorsiventrally compressed

• Pedicelled spikelet well developed, acute to acuminate or with short awn-point, glabrous or hairy.
• Florets 2, male only or rarely reduced and sterile; lemma awnless
• x = 5, 10

Nomenclature:

• Elionurus Kunth ex Willd.
  • Willdenow: 901 (1806) as Elyonurus
  • Stapf: 332 (1898)
  • Phillips & Bredell: 259 (1937)
  • Clayton & Renvoize: 835 (1982)
  • Clayton & Renvoize: 362 (1986)
  • Gibbs Russell et al.: 130 (1990)
  • Watson & Dallwitz: 366 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 15, cosmopolitan, tropical and subtropical
• Southern Africa: Species 2: Elionurus muticus (Spreng.) Kunth, widespread except Western Cape; and E. tripsacoides Willd., NE Namibia