Glabrous annual with fibrous roots. Stems very slender, densely tufted, setaceous, angular, smooth. (2-)5-15(-25) cm by ¼-⅓ mm. Leaves short, fili-form, smooth, or scabrid at the top, ¼-⅓ wide; ligule absent; sheaths obliquely truncate, the lower ones bladeless or short-bladed, brownish. Inflorescence simple or subcompound, umbelliform, with up to 15 spikelets, but not rarely much reduced. Involucral bracts 3-5, shorter to longer than the inflorescence, dilated at the base. Primary rays up to 10, smooth, up to 2 cm. Spikelets solitary, subglobose or oblong, terete, obtuse, squarrose, very densely many-flowered, pale green, 3-6 by 2-3 mm; rachilla densely ragged by minute wings. Glumes spiral, thinly membranous, spreading, oblong or lanceolate, keeled, the blade c. 1 by ½ mm, with hyaline, obscurely 1-2-nerved sides and a strong green midrib excurrent into a ½-1 mm long recurved awn slightly scabrid at the top. Stamen 1; anther oblong, ⅓ mm. Style glabrous, slightly dilated at the base, ferrugineous, ¼ mm long; stigmas 2, about as long as the style. Nut scarcely compressed, subterete, oblong-linear, very rarely narrowly obovoid, slightly curved, obscurely transversely lineolate by the minute, hexagonal or elliptic epidermal cells, fer-rugineous or brown, ½-¾ by 1/6 mm(or, when obovoid, 2/5 by ¼ mm), on either margin ornamented with a row of clavate appendages (glands?), which often fall off with age.
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