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| Festuca of North America |
Bot. Gaz. 2: 126. 1877. Type: U.S.A. Oregon: 1892, C.V. Piper. US.
Habitat and distribution. Northwestern USA: Oreg., Wash.; Southwestern USA: Calif.
Notes. Recognized as a distinct species by Alexeev (1982), who cited five specimens collected from Washington to California. He claimed that the species resembles Eurasian sulcate fescues of the group F. ovina subsp. laevis Hack. in having dense tufts, smooth leaf blades with 3 sclerenchyma strands, 3–5 veins and 7 vascular bundles. Alexeev (1982) stated that this is not as Hitchcock and Chase (1951) suggested, a synonym of F. rubra L. The leaf cross sections illustrated by Alexeev (1982) appear similar to that of F. valesiaca Schleich. ex Gaud. that has been introduced in some areas. In Oregon, specimens of F. idahoensis subsp. roemeri (Pavlick) S. Aiken often have similar leaf cross sections (B.L. Wilson, personal communication, 1995).
L.E. Pavlick in 1984 annotated a specimen that Alexeev considered may be a type of F. oregona, a Vasey collection, US 556161, as "F. rubra L. subsp." and with the words, "this is not Festuca oregona Vasey Bot. Gaz. 2: 126. It does not match Vasey's descriptions, which was published in 1877, 15 years before this specimen was collected."
We advise against extracting comparative information from the descriptions. This is much more easily achieved using the DELTA data files or the interactive key, which allows access to the character list, illustrations with detailed captions, full and partial descriptions, diagnostic descriptions, differences and similarities between taxa, lists of taxa exhibiting or lacking specified attributes, and distributions of character states within any set of taxa. See also Guidelines for using data taken from Web publications.
Cite this publication as: ‘Aiken, S.G., Dallwitz, M.J., McJannet, C.L. and Consaul, L.L. 1996 onwards. Festuca of North America: descriptions, illustrations, identification, and information retrieval. Version: 14th February 2019. delta-intkey.com’. Aiken, Dallwitz, McJannet, and Consaul (1997) should also be cited (see References).