Herb, dioecious, caespitose, perennial. Cataphylls scarious, glabrous, base with pale brown to orange woolly hairs. Culms unbranched below the inflorescence, 30–100 cm long, terete, 1–2 mm diam., striate, light-to grey-green or purplish brown, covered with pale, appressed, sometimes caducous, scale-like trichomes; internodes 6.5–7.5 cm long. Sheaths 5–12, 0.7–1.5 cm long, striate, pale brown, with pale, scale-like trichomes when young, becoming glabrous and darker with age, apex mucronate with a narrow blunt mucro 1.5 mm long; margin hyaline, 1–1.5 mm wide, caducous. Inflorescence: male spikelets on short branches or filiform tomentose pedicels up to c. 1 cm long, clustered at the upper nodes; female spikelets in small, tight fascicles on short branches or clustered at the upper nodes; the clusters 3–6 mm diam., narrow-ellipsoid and brown when flowering but becoming globose and grey-white when fruiting due to the densely pubescent glumes and tepals; with up to 50 (–80) flowers. Male spikelets narrow-ovoid becoming wider at maturity, 4.5–9.0 mm long; glumes 20–40, usually all fertile, ovate, acute to acuminate, 2.0–3.5 mm long, membranous, brown-hyaline, glabrous. Female spikelets: glumes broad-ovate, acuminate, 1–1.5 mm long, 0.7–1.0 mm wide, membranous, brown-hyaline, glabrous; floral bracts 2, keeled, acuminate, densely fimbriate, brown-hyaline, one lanceolate, the other broad-lanceolate, 1–2 mm long. Male flowers: tepals 5 or 6; outer tepals keeled, oblanceolate, acuminate, 0.9–1.5 mm long, brown-hyaline; inner tepals flat, lanceolate, acute to cuspidate, 0.7–1.3 mm long, membranous, hyaline; stamens 3, filaments stout, 0.3–0.6 mm long, anthers 1–1.5 mm long. Female flowers: tepals 6, narrow-lanceolate to oblanceolate, acute to acuminate, 1–2 mm long, brown-hyaline becoming grey and densely fimbriate, the indumentum concentrated around the margin; style 3-branched, filiform, almost wholly free and stigmatic, c. 2 mm long, the base persistent on the nut. Nut trigonous, c. 1.5 mm long, brown. Seed c. 1 mm long. Culm anatomy: chlorenchyma interrupted by groups of pillar cells that extend from the parenchyma sheath to the epidermis.
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