Flora of North America species comparison

The green links below add additional plants to the comparison table. Blue links lead to other Web sites.
enable glossary links

Aristida purpurea var. parishii
Photo is of parent taxon

Parish three-awn, Parish's threeawn
Culms

20-50 cm.
Leaves

mostly cauline;

blades more than 10 cm, loosely involute to flat.
Panicles

15-24 cm;

primary branches stiff, lower branches strongly divergent to divaricate, with axillary pulvini, upper branches appressed to ascending, without axaillary pulvini, lower nodes associated with 8-18 spikelets.
Glumes

red or dark at anthesis, fading to stramineous;

lower glumes 7-11 mm, 3/4 as long as to equaling the upper glumes;

upper glumes 10-15 mm;

lemmas 10-13 mm long, narrowing to 0.2-0.3 mm wide near the apex;

awns subequal, 20-30 mm long, 0.2-0.3 mm wide at the base.
2n

= unknown.

Aristida purpurea var. parishii
Distribution
from FNA
AZ; CA; NV
[BONAP county map]
Discussion

Aristida purpurea var. parishii grows on sandy plains and hills of the southwestern United States and Baja California, Mexico. In many respects it is intermediate between A. purpurea and other species of Aristida with spreading panicle branches, especially A. ternipes var. gentilis. Its spikelets are indistinguishable from those of var. wrightii, but var. parishii frequently has axillary pulvini associated with the lower branches. The two also differ in their phenology: var. parishii flowers from March through May in response to winter rains, whereas var. wrightii flowers from May through October in response to summer rains.

(Discussion copyrighted by Flora of North America; reprinted with permission.)
Source FNA vol. 25, p. 333.
Parent taxa Poaceae > subfam. Aristidoideae > tribe Aristideae > Aristida > Aristida purpurea
Sibling taxa
A. purpurea var. fendleriana, A. purpurea var. longiseta, A. purpurea var. nealleyi, A. purpurea var. perplexa, A. purpurea var. purpurea, A. purpurea var. wrightii
Synonyms A. wrightii var. parishii, A. parishii
Name authority (Hitchc.) Allred
Web links 
Unless otherwise noted, all data comes from the online version of the Flora of North America, who have made most of their content available via a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).



Type/paste one or more Latin names into the boxes above; matching taxa will show up below the box as you type. You can use the up/down arrow keys to move through the list.

(If the plant you're looking for doesn't show up in the auto-complete list, that means it either isn't described in Flora of North America yet, or it's listed under a synonym. And please note that Flora of North America is still missing several plant families, including Apiaceae, Boraginaceae, and Polemoniaceae.)

Choose a data source: Flora of North America

The species comparison tool is brought to you by:
Northwest Wildflowers