Eriocoma hymenoides

Eriocoma hymenoides, Indian ricegrass (formerly placed in Achnatherum and Oryzopsis), is a tufted, cool-season perennial bunchgrass in the family Poaceae native to western North America, from southern Canada through the Great Basin, Southwest and northern Mexico, where it grows on sandy, well-drained soils in deserts, sagebrush steppe, pinyon-juniper woodland and dune systems. Plants form dense tussocks 30 to 75 centimetres tall with narrow, tightly inrolled basal leaves about 1 to 2 millimetres wide. The diffuse, openly branched panicle is 7 to 25 centimetres long, with paired, slender, flexuous branches each bearing a single terminal spikelet. Spikelets contain a single floret enclosed by papery glumes and a densely white-pilose, hard, dark-brown to nearly black lemma about 3 millimetres long, tipped with a short, weakly bent, deciduous awn. The large nutritious caryopsis was a staple seed grain for many Indigenous peoples of the arid West. The species is drought-tolerant and ecologically important as forage and revegetation grass.