Dichanthelium sphaerocarpon

Dichanthelium sphaerocarpon, the round-seed rosette panic grass, is a tufted perennial bunchgrass of the family Poaceae growing typically 1.5 to 5 decimetres (about 15 to 50 cm) tall. Like other rosette panicums, it produces a low overwintering basal rosette of short, broad leaves and erect to ascending summer culms bearing leaves with blades up to about 9.5 cm long and 2 to 20 mm wide. The plant flowers twice during the season, producing a terminal vernal panicle of small, more or less spherical spikelets in early summer followed by smaller axillary autumnal panicles partially hidden among the upper leaves; spikelets are obovoid to nearly globose, glabrous to minutely puberulent, with the lower glume short and the upper glume and sterile lemma enclosing a single fertile floret. It occurs across the eastern United States from Massachusetts south to Florida and west to Texas, growing in thin woods, meadows and ditches on dry sandy soils; it is listed as endangered in Michigan and believed extirpated from Connecticut.