Perennial, forming tussocks from a woody rootstock; culms 10-60 cm high, ascending, wiry with narrow leaves or herbaceous and leafy. Leaf-blades flat or involute, 2-15 cm long, 1-5 mm wide. Panicle usually narrowly oblong, 3-15 cm long, fairly dense. Spikelets 2.5-35 mm long; lower glume a minute truncate scale (rarely up to 0.5 mm ); upper glume ovate, tuberculate pilose with white hairs extending 0.54 mm beyond the tip, but often glabrous in the upper quarter, acute and usually mucronate; lower lemma resembling the upper glume.