Great quaking grass

Great quaking grass
	Great quaking grass ( Briza maxima ) in Corsica
Systematics
Order :	Sweet grass (Poales)
Family :	Sweet grasses (Poaceae)
Subfamily :	Pooideae
Tribe :	Poeae
Genre :	Trembling grasses ( Briza )
Type :	Great quaking grass
Scientific name
	Briza maxima
	L.

The great quaking grass ( Briza maxima ) is a species of the sweet grass family (Poaceae).

description

The annual plant reaches heights of 10 to 60 centimeters. It grows loosely in clusters . The entire plant is bare. The yellow-green, flat and thin leaves are 3 to 8 millimeters wide. They are finely rough around the edges. The ligule is 2 to 5 millimeters long and the leaf sheaths are smooth.

The drooping spikelets , often overflowing with red, are solitary or up to twelve in loose, sparsely branched panicles on 6 to 20 mm long, hair-thin stems. The spikelets are broadly heart-shaped to rounded and laterally compressed and are between 14 and 25 mm long. They consist of seven to twenty flowers . The husks have no awns . The lemmas are 6 to 8 mm long and have seven to eight nerves. The palea are very finely hairy on their keels.

The grass blooms between April and June.

The number of chromosomes is 2n = 14.

Distribution and location

The plant is native and widespread in the Mediterranean and Macaronesia. It was introduced to the British Isles and Germany, among others. In England it is naturalized on dry banks, rocky locations and cultivated land in Jersey , Guernsey and the Isles of Scilly . In Germany it is very rare (not naturalized) and only occurs scattered in ruderal corridors .

In its natural range, the grass prefers garigues , pastures, cultivated land and roadsides.

Taxonomy

The scientific name Briza maxima was first published in 1753 by Carl von Linné in Species Plantarum .

use

The great quaking grass is used as an ornamental plant because of its attractive ears, either for use as a green plant or in dry bouquets.

literature

Ingrid Schönfelder, Peter Schönfelder : Kosmos Atlas Mediterranean and Canary Islands flora. Over 1600 species of plants . 2nd Edition. Franckh-Kosmos, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-440-09361-1 .
Charles Edward Hubbard: Grasses. Description, distribution, use (= UTB . Volume 233 ). 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart (Hohenheim) 1985, ISBN 3-8001-2537-4 (English: Grasses . Translated by Peter Boeker).

Individual evidence

Web links

Commons : Large trembling grass album with pictures, videos and audio files

Great quaking grass. In: FloraWeb.de.
Briza maxima L. In: Info Flora , the national data and information center for Swiss flora .
Distribution in the British Isles.
Distribution in the Netherlands [2] (Dutch)

[Tropicos-1] Tropicos. [1]

[WCSP-2] Rafaël Govaerts (ed.): Briza maxima. In: World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (WCSP) - The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew . Retrieved November 3, 2016.

[SpPl-3] Carl von Linné: Species Plantarum. Volume 1, Lars Salvius, Stockholm 1753, p. 70 ( digitized version ).