Plants annual. Culms to 60 cm, procumbent to erect, sparingly branched at the base. Leaves basal and cauline; sheaths open, glabrous; auriclesabsent; ligules longer than wide, acute; blades linear, usually flat, sometimes convolute when dry, glabrous. Inflorescences terminal, racemes or panicles, usually with 1 branch per node; branches stiff, 3-sided. Spikelets lanceolate to ovate, laterally compressed, with 4-25 florets, distal florets reduced; disarticulation above the glumes and below the florets; rachillas not prolonged beyond the uppermost floret. Glumes unequal to subequal, shorter than the spikelets, 1-5-veined; calluses blunt, rounded, glabrous; lemmas narrowly elliptic, coriaceous at maturity, inconspicuously 5-veined, glabrous, sometimes scabridulous towards the apices, apices acute, sometimes bifid, often mucronate; paleas about as long as the lemmas, 2-veined; lodicules 2, free, lanceolate; anthers 3, only slightly exserted at anthesis; ovaries glabrous. Caryopses ellipsoid-oblong, dorsally flattened, falling with the paleas; hila about 1/10 as long as the caryopses, ovate. x = 7. Named for Jean Baptiste Henri Joseph Desmazières (1786-1862), a French merchant, amateur botanist, and horticulturalist.
Desmazeria has six or seven species, all of which are native around the Mediterranean. There are two species in the Flora region, one established as a weed and one introduced as an ornamental.
One or two genera have sometimes been segregated from Desmazeria; current opinion favors the treatment presented here.
SELECTED REFERENCESHitchcock, A.S. 1951 [title page 1950]. Manual of the Grasses of the United States, ed. 2, rev. A. Chase. U.S.D.A. Miscellaneous Publication No. 200. U.S.Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., U.S.A. 1051 pp.; Stace, C.A. 1978. Notes on Cutandia and related genera. Bot. J. Linn. Soc. 76:350-352.