The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Aristida
Also called Three Awn, Threeawn Grass, Triple Awned Grass, Threeawns And Wiregrasses, Wiregrass
Aristida is a very nearly cosmopolitan genus of plants in the grass family. Aristida is distinguished by having three awns (bristles) on each lemma of each floret. The genus includes about 300 species found worldwide, often in arid warm regions. This genus is among those colloquially called three-awns wiregrasses, speargrasses and needlegrasses. The name Aristida is derived from the Latin "arista", meaning "awn".
They are characteristic of semiarid grassland. The Wiregrass Region of North America is named for A. stricta. Other locales where this genus is an important component of the ecosystem include the Carolina Bays, the sandhills of the Carolinas, and elsewhere, Mulga scrub in Australia, and the xeric grasslands around Lake Turkana in Africa. Local increases in the abundance of wiregrasses is a good indicator of overgrazing, as livestock avoid them.
Aristida acuta · Sixweeks threeawn · Aristida anaclasta · Aristida arida · Forked threeawn · Brush Spear Grass · Bentham's Aristida · California threeawn · Dark Wire Grass · Aristida capillacea · Chase's threeawn · Spreading Prickle Grass
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Aristida by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
