Plants perennial, up 100 cm tall, forming dense tufts, rarely with short runners. Culms slender to coarse; nodes glabrous. Leaves: auricles not present; blades flat, lower surfaces glabrous or scabrous, rarely with sparse hairs; older basal sheaths usually fibrous. Spikes 4.5-10 cm long, pale or greyish green to pale greyish violet. Central spikelets sessile to subsessile; glumes 7-15 mm long, setaceous, usually erect in the fruiting stage, lower portion rarely somewhat flattened; lemmas glabrous to somewhat scabrous-hairy at the tip, rarely densely pubescent; lemma awns 1.5-8 mm long; anthers 1.3-3 mm long, yellow or purple. Lateral spikelets: lemmas rudimentary or well-developed and staminate, rarely bisexual, tips muticous to aristulate (awn up to 0.8 mm).
Hordeum parodii grows from the northern part of Mendoza Province south to Santa Cruz Province in Argentina. In addition, there are a few scattered localities in the province of Buenos Aires, the Magellanes region of osuthern Chile, and the Chilean side of the Tierra del Fuego. It grows in humid habitats such grassy or sandy riverbanks and canals and in wet pastures. It is found near both fresh and saline water at elevations up to 1000m. It is a fairly common plant in the central part of its distrubition wherever suitable habitats are found.
Hordeum parodii is segmental allohexaploid. Its progenitors are Hordeum pubiflorum, Hordeum flexuosum, and Hordeum chilense (Bothmer et al 1995; Brassac and Blattner (2015)).