.jpg)
Manual of the New Zealand Flora.
24. Eleusine, Gaertn
24. Eleusine, Gaertn.
Annual or perennial grasses. Leaves long, flat or folded, firm or membranous. Spikelets 3-to many-flowered, laterally compressed, sessile and densely imbricate in 2 rows on one side of a flattened rhachis, forming linear spikes; spikes digitately arranged or irregularly scattered rhachilla disarticulating above the outer glumes. Two outer glumes shorter than the flowering glumes, persistent, empty, unequal, keeled, obtuse or mucronate, membranous, 3–5-nerved. Flowering glumes similar to the outer glumes, 3-nerved at the base. Palea shorter than the glumes, complicate and 2-keeled. Lodicules 2, minute. Stamens 3; anthers short. Styles short, distinct; stigmas plumose. Grain broadly oblong, grooved pericarp lax, hyaline.
Species 6, most plentiful in tropical Asia and Africa, the one found in the New Zealand area a weed in all warm countries.
| 1. | E. indica,Gaertn. Fruet. i. 8.—Annual. Culms tufted, erect or decumbent at the base, branched, stout or slender, compressed, quite glabrous, 9–24 in. high. Leaves numerous, distichous, 4–9 in. long, ⅛–⅓ in. broad, flat, rather flaccid, acuminate sheaths compressed, pale, margins ciliate; ligulesalmost obsolete. Spikes page 893rather slender, straight, 1½–3 in. long, usually 3–6 in a terminalumbel, generally one inserted lower down; rhachis smooth or pubescent at the base. Spikelets about ⅙ in. long, densely imbricated, 3–6-flowered. Two outer glumes unequal, the lower small, 1-nerved; the upper 3–5-nerved. Flowering glumes much larger, ovate when spread out, acute, 3-nerved. Grain oblong; pericarp very lax and membranous, enclosing the rugose seed.—Benth. Fl. Austral. vii. 615 Cheesem. in Trans. N.Z. Inst. xx. (1888) 176.
Kermadec Islands Lower portions of Sunday Island and on Meyer Island, plentiful and apparently indigenous, T. F. C.North and South Islands Naturalised near Auckland, Sinclair, and at Westport, Townson! |