Maidencane

Panicum hemitomon Schultes, in R. & S. Syst. Veg. Mant. 2:
227. 1824.
Panicum Walteri Muhl. Descr. Gram. 108. 1817. Not P. Walteri Pursh, 1814. Panicum carolinianum Spreng. Syst. 1: 310. 1825.
Panicum carinatum Torr.; M. A. Curt. Bost. Jour. Nat. Hist. 1: 137. 1835. Not P. carinatum J. Presl, 1830.
Panicum digitarioides Carpenter; M. A. Curt, Am. Jour. Sci. II. 7: 410, as synonym. 1849. Not
P. digitarioides Rasp. 1833. Panicum Curtisii Chapm. Fl. S. U. S. 573. 1860. Not P. Curtisii Steud. 1854. Brachiaria digitarioides Nash, in Britton, Man. 77. 1901.
Plants aquatic or semiaquatic, with extensively creeping rootstocks often producing numerous sterile shoots with overlapping, sometimes densely hirsute sheaths, and blades 10-25 cm. long and 8-12 mm. wide, strigose on one or both surfaces; fertile culms erect, 0.5-1.5 meters or more high, stout, usually hard, glabrous; submerged leaf-sheaths rather loose and papery, often nodulose, the aerial ones shorter than the internodes, close, glabrous or ciliate on the margin, rarely hirsute toward the summit like those of the sterile shoots, or the lower hirsute throughout; ligule lacerate-ciliate, about 1 mm. long; blades ascending or spreading, 10-25 cm. long, 7-15 mm. wide, acuminate, rounded at base, firm, usually scabrous on the upper surface, smooth below; panicles sbort-exserted, 15-30 cm. long, very narrow, the branches erect or ascending, solitary or 2 or 3 in a fascicle, the lower distant, gradually approxirhate upward, 210 cm. long, bearing short, appressed branchlets or subsessile spikelets along the triquetrous, scabrous rachis; spikelets 2.4-2.7 mm. long, 0.8-1 mm. wide, lanceolate, acute, often slightly laterally compressed (that is the glumes so keeled that the spikelet lies on its side) ; first glume clasping, about half the length of spikelet, acute, 3-nerved; second glume strongly keeled, somewhat boat-shaped, acute, 3-5-nerved, slightly shorter than the 5 -nerved sterile lemma, the latter inclosing a membranaceous, scabrous-nerved palea of nearly equal length; fruit 2.32.5 mm. long, 0.7 mm. wide, slightly boat-shaped, elliptic, acute, smooth and shining, not rigid, the margins of the lemma inrolled toward the base only, the apex of the palea scarcely inclosed.
Type locality: Charleston, South Carolina. Distribution: Delaware to Florida, and west to eastern Texas.