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.
Arrhenatherum elatius
Also called Tall Oatgrass, Tall Oat Grass, Bulbous Oatgrass, Onion Couch, Onion Twitch, Onion Root Twitch, False Oatgrass
In Singapore: Striped Tuber Oat Grass, Variegated Tall Oatgrass, Variegated Bulbous Oat Grass, False Oat Grass, Orchard Grass (Grown in Singapore)
False oat-grass is a tall, coarse, tufted perennial grass of meadows, roadsides and waste ground, grown mainly as an ornamental or as "cat grass". It is hardy and undemanding, and is best kept in check in a garden because it seeds freely.
Arrhenatherum elatius is a species of flowering plant in the grass family Poaceae, commonly known as false oat-grass, and also bulbous oat grass (subsp. bulbosum), tall oat-grass, tall meadow oat, onion couch and tuber oat-grass. It is native throughout Europe (including Iceland), and also western and southwestern Asia (south to Jordan and Iran), and northwestern Africa (Morocco to Tunisia). This tufted grass is sometimes used as an ornamental grass and is sometimes marketed as "cat grass".
Outside of its native range it can be found elsewhere as an introduced species. It is found especially in prairies, at the side of roads and in uncultivated fields. The bulbous subspecies can be a weed of arable land. It is palatable grass for livestock and is used both as forage (pasture) and fodder (hay and silage).
Arrhenatherum elatius is a principal species in two UK National Vegetation Classification habitat communities: the very widespread MG1 (Arrhenatherum elatius grassland) and the much rarer MG2 (Arrhenatherum elatius - Filipendula ulmaria tall-herb grassland). This means that it can be found with species such as Dactylis glomerata (also known as cock's-foot and orchard grass), and Filipendula ulmaria (also known as meadow-sweet).
[Contains information from Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Heritage Trees from data.gov.sg (National Parks Board), made available under the terms of the Singapore Open Data Licence version 1.0]
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Arrhenatherum elatius by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
