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Hordeum spontaneum
Spontaneous barley is the wild annual grass ancestor of cultivated barley, found in dry, Mediterranean and highland habitats. It is grown mainly as a wild or research plant rather than a garden plant, and it is hardy to drought and salinity.
Hordeum spontaneum, commonly known as wild barley or spontaneous barley, is the wild form of the grass in the family Poaceae that gave rise to the cereal barley (Hordeum vulgare). Domestication is thought to have occurred on two occasions, first about ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent and again later, several thousand kilometres further east.
Wild barley is native to North Africa, the Middle East, parts of the Indian subcontinent and south-west China. Its range includes Libya, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Crete, Cyprus, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, India and the Sichuan and Xizang provinces of China.
Bulbous barley · Hordeum comosum · Two Rowed Barley · Foxtail barley · Little barley · Barley · Barley
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Hordeum spontaneum 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.
