PANlCEiE 



59 



Digitaria longiflora, Pers. 



This is a perennial grass with short underground branches 

 covered with scales. Stems are many, tutted, slender, creeping and 

 rooting, or ascending and suberect, simple or branched, 6 to 20 

 inches long and leafy and leaves bifarious and divaricate. 



Leaf-sheaths are hairy or glabrous, compressed, keeled. The 

 ligule is a short membrane. Nodes are glabrous. 



Leaf-blades are broadly lanceolate or linear-lanceolate, acute, 

 spreading, flat, or in short-leaved forms, stiff and pungent, I to 2 

 inches long (rarely also 5 inches long), glabrous above and below, 

 ciliate at the margins towards the base, and with a very minutely 

 serrate hyaline margin. 



The inflorescence consists of two to four terminal spikes with a 

 slender, long, hairy or glabrous peduncle. The spikes are slender, 

 erect or spreading with fine winged glabrous rachis. 



The spikelets are small, 1/20 to 1/14 inch, geminate, one short 



and the other long 

 pedicelled, appressed 

 to the rachis, elliptic, 

 silky with slendei 

 crisped hairs, pale 

 green or purplish. 



There are three 

 glumes with a rudi- 

 mentary first glume, 

 The first glume is very 

 minute and hyaline. 

 The second glume 

 is as long as the 

 third, membranous, 

 5-nerved (rarely 3- to 

 7-nerved), silkily 



hairy. The third 

 glume is similar to 

 the second and 

 usually 7-nerved 



(rarely 3- to 5-nerved). 

 The fourth glume 

 is subchartaceous, 

 ovate-oblong, paleate, 

 the slightly shorter than 

 the third glume, pale 

 brown, smooth. 



2 



Fig. 77. — Digitaria longiflora. 



A portion of the spike ; 2. the first glume ; 3 and 4. 



second and third glumes ; 5 and 6. the fourth glume 



and its palea ; 7. lodicules, ovary and stamens. 



There are two small lodicules. Styles are long and purple. 



This grass grows in cultivated dry fields. It seems to like a 

 sandy loamy soil. 



Distribution. — Throughout India. 



