Bromus rigidus

Bromus rigidus, commonly known as ripgut brome or stiff brome, is an erect annual grass in the family Poaceae native to the Mediterranean basin and southern Europe and widely naturalised through much of temperate and subtropical North and South America, Australia and southern Africa, particularly in California where it is a dominant species of annual grassland and disturbed roadsides. Plants grow 30 to 90 centimetres tall in loose tufts of slender, glabrous to softly pubescent culms. The leaf blades are flat, 4 to 20 centimetres long and 2 to 6 millimetres wide, with hairy sheaths and a short truncate ligule. The inflorescence is an open or somewhat contracted panicle 8 to 20 centimetres long bearing a few large, drooping spikelets on long stiff pedicels; each spikelet is 25 to 70 millimetres long including the awns and contains five to eleven florets. The lemmas are firm and rough, with stout, straight, divergent awns 30 to 60 millimetres long that become sharp and rigid at maturity, breaking into a callused florets that lodge in the eyes, ears and digestive tracts of livestock and so give the plant its evocative common name.