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Hyparrhenia hirta is a species of
grassThe Poaceae is a large and nearly ubiquitous family of flowering plants. Members of this family are commonly called grasses, although the term "grass" is also applied to plants that are not in the Poaceae lineage, including the rushes and sedges...
known by the common names
common thatching grass and
Coolatai grass. It is native to much of Africa and Eurasia, and it is known on other continents as an
introduced speciesAn introduced species — or neozoon, alien, exotic, non-indigenous, or non-native species, or simply an introduction, is a species living outside its indigenous or native distributional range, and has arrived in an ecosystem or plant community by human activity, either deliberate or accidental...
. In eastern
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
it is a tenacious noxious weed. In
South AfricaThe Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
, where it is native, it is very common and one of the most widely used
thatchingThatching is the craft of building a roof with dry vegetation such as straw, water reed, sedge , rushes, or heather, layering the vegetation so as to shed water away from the inner roof. It is a very old roofing method and has been used in both tropical and temperate climates...
grasses. It is also used for
grazingGrazing generally describes a type of feeding, in which a herbivore feeds on plants , and also on other multicellular autotrophs...
livestock and weaving mats and
basketsBasket weaving is the process of weaving unspun vegetable fibres into a basket or other similar form. People and artists who weave baskets are called basketmakers and basket weavers.Basketry is made from a variety of fibrous or pliable materials•anything that will bend and form a shape...
.
This is a perennial grass forming clumps 30 centimetres to one metre tall with tough, dense bases sprouting from
rhizomeIn botany and dendrology, a rhizome is a characteristically horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes...
s. The
inflorescenceAn inflorescence is a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a stem that is composed of a main branch or a complicated arrangement of branches. Strictly, it is the part of the shoot of seed plants where flowers are formed and which is accordingly modified...
atop the wiry stem is a
panicleA panicle is a compound raceme, a loose, much-branched indeterminate inflorescence with pedicellate flowers attached along the secondary branches; in other words, a branched cluster of flowers in which the branches are racemes....
of hairy spikelets with bent awns up to 3.5 centimetres long. The grass can grow in a variety of habitat types, in dry conditions, heavy, rocky,
erodedErosion is when materials are removed from the surface and changed into something else. It only works by hydraulic actions and transport of solids in the natural environment, and leads to the deposition of these materials elsewhere...
soils, and disturbed areas.
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