Page:Manual of the New Zealand Flora.djvu/820

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Usually perennial herbs, of very various habit, stout, erect and rush-like, or slender and diffuse, rarely creeping. Leaves near the base of the stem or cauline, sometimes reduced to sheathing scales. Spikelets compressed, few-flowered, panicled or capitate or fascicled. Glumes more or less distichous, 3 or more outer ones empty, 1–4 succeeding ones hermaphrodite and fruit-bearing, uppermost male or empty; rhachilla elongated and flexuose between the flowering glumes, with the flowers seated in the alternate notches. Hypogynous bristles present or wanting. Stamens usually 3, rarely fewer or 4–6. Style slender, sometimes slightly thickened near the base; style-branches 3. Nut obovoid, ovoid, or oblong, trigonous.

1. S. brevifolius, R. Br. Prodr. 281.—Rhizome short, stout, creeping. Stems rush-like, densely tufted, rigid, erect, terete, smooth and polished, 1–2 ft. high. Leaves reduced to 3 or 4 dark red-brown appressed sheaths at the base of the stem, the uppermost of which has a short rigid erect subulate lamina ½–1 in. long. Panicle narrow, 3–8 in. long; branches slender, erect; bracts at the base with appressed sheaths and a short erect lamina. Spikelets lanceolate, compressed, ⅓–½ in. long, 2–3-flowered, red-brown.