Spreading Beak Sedge

Plants perennial, densely cespitose, 10–60 cm; rhizomes absent. Culms erect or spreading arching, linear filiform, terete, leafy toward base. Leaves overtopped by culm; blades ascending, filiform, 0.3–0.5 mm wide, margins deeply involute, then channeled, apex tri-gonous, setaceous. Inflorescences: spikelet clusters 1–2(–4), dense(–open), narrowly to broadly turbinate; branches capillary, variously elongate; leafy bracts setaceous, proximal exceeding clusters. Spikelets brownish, lance ellipsoid to fusiform, 2–2.5(–3) mm, apex acute; fertile scales broadly elliptic, 1.5 mm, apex narrowly rounded to broadly acute, apiculate, convex cupulate, midrib narrow, short excurrent or included. Flowers: perianth absent. Fruits 1–3 or more per spikelet, (0.6–)0.7–0.9(–1) mm; body pale, glassy, obovoid lenticular, 0.6–0.7 × 0.4–0.5 mm, margins narrow, wirelike; surfaces finely striate, very finely reticulate; tubercle button depressed triangular or patelliform, 0.1–0.15 mm, apiculate.

Ala., Fla., Ga., La., Miss., N.C., S.C., Tex.; West Indies (Bahamas, Cuba, Dominican Republic); Central America.

Fruiting summer–fall or all year (south).

Moist sands, peats, silts or clays of low meadows, bogs, flatwoods, sometimes seeps over calcareous rock; 0–300m.