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Hordeum pusillum
Also called Little foxtail barley, Little Wild Barley
Little barley is a small annual wild grass native to much of North America, growing 14 to 40 cm tall with a bristly seed head. It is a wild relative of cultivated barley, and its small grains were eaten by Native Americans.
Hordeum pusillum, also known as little barley, is an annual grass native to most of the United States and southwestern Canada. It arrived via multiple long-distance dispersals of a southern South American species of Hordeum about one million years ago. Its closest relatives are therefore not the other North American taxa like meadow barley (Hordeum brachyantherum) or foxtail barley (Hordeum jubatum), but rather Hordeum species of the Pampas of central Argentina and Uruguay. It is less closely related to the Old World domesticated barley, from which it diverged about 12 million years ago. It is diploid.
The small grains are edible, and this plant was part of the Eastern Agricultural Complex of cultivated plants used in the Pre-Columbian era by Native Americans. Before being displaced by agriculture based on maize, little barley may have been domesticated.
Bulbous barley · Hordeum comosum · Two Rowed Barley · Foxtail barley · Spontaneous barley · Barley · Barley
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Hordeum pusillum 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.
