Elephant grass

Panicum maximum, commonly known as Guinea grass and also placed by some authorities in the segregate genus Megathyrsus, is a large, tussock-forming perennial grass in the family Poaceae native to sub-Saharan Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, where it forms an important component of savannas and seasonally dry grasslands, and now naturalised across the warmer regions of the world as one of the leading tropical pasture and forage species. Plants grow in dense tufts 1 to 3 metres tall, occasionally to 4.5 metres, from a short knotty rootstock with creeping rhizomes; the culms are stout, erect, terete and glabrous or sparsely hairy at the densely bearded nodes. The leaf blades are flat, linear, 30 to 80 centimetres long and 1 to 3.5 centimetres wide, bright green and somewhat glaucous, with scabrous margins and an obvious midrib. The inflorescence is a large open ovoid panicle 20 to 50 centimetres long, with whorled branches arising from each node and bearing many small ovate-elliptic spikelets 2.5 to 4 millimetres long. The spikelets bear a single fertile floret with a distinctive transversely rugose lemma at maturity that aids in identification.