Indiangrass

Description

Sorghastrum nutans, commonly known as either Indiangrass or yellow Indiangrass, is a North American prairie grass found in the central and eastern United States and Canada, especially in the Great Plains and tallgrass prairies. Indiangrass is a warm-season perennial bunchgrass. It is intolerant to shade. It grows 3 to 7 feet (1 to 2 m) tall, and is distinguished by a "rifle-sight" ligule where the leaf blade attaches to the leaf sheath. The leaf is about 3 feet (1 m) long. It blooms from late summer to early fall, producing branched clusters (panicles) of spikelets. The spikelets are golden-brown during the blooming period, and each contain one perfect floret that has three large, showy yellow stamens and two feather-like stigmas. One of the two glumes at the base of the spikelets is covered in silky white hairs. The flowers are cross-pollinated by the wind. The branches of pollinated flower clusters bend outwards. At maturity, the seeds fall to the ground. There are about 175,000 seeds per pound. Sorghastrum nutans is prominent in the tallgrass prairie ecosystem and the northern, central, and Flint Hills tall grassland ecoregions, along with big bluestem (Andropogon gerardi), little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) and switchgrass (Panicum virgatum). It is also common in areas of longleaf pine. It is adapted in the United States from the southern border to Canada and from the eastern seaboard to Montana, Wyoming and Utah. It regrows with renewed vitality after fires, so controlled burns are used, replacing extirpated large herbivores (i.e. bison), for habitat renewal. It is a larval host to the pepper-and-salt skipper. Sorbus is a genus of over 100 species of trees and shrubs in the rose family, Rosaceae. Species of Sorbus are commonly known as whitebeam, rowan (mountain-ash) and service tree. The exact number of species is disputed depending on the circumscription of the genus, and also due to the number of apomictic microspecies, which some treat as distinct species, but others group in a smaller number of variable species. Recent treatments classify Sorbus in a narrower sense to include only the pinnate leaved species of subgenus Sorbus, raising several of the other subgenera to generic rank. Sorbus is not closely related to the true ash trees which belong to the genus Fraxinus, although the leaves are superficially similar.