By Ellen Dean
The Rare Plant of the Month blog highlights one of the rare plants in the CNPS Rare Plant Inventory (RPI), an invaluable resource that has helped protect approximately 2,450 rare plant taxa in California since 1974!
Grasses don’t get enough love, do they? California alkali grass (Puccinellia simplex) is a handsome annual grass adapted to the alkaline, salty soils of the Central Valley, Coast Range surrounding the Bay Area, and Mojave Desert. It likes to live in wet soils, such as near mineral springs and vernal pools, as well as in drier alkaline plains, alkali sinks, and saline scrub vegetation. Basically, if you were having dinner with California alkali grass, it would say, “Pass the salt!”
Historically California alkali grass had a very broad range, growing from San Bernardino County in the south to Glenn County in the north. Over the past 20 years, botanists have made fewer than 25 collections or observations of the plant. California alkali grass has declined in California and is so rarely found that in 2015 scientists gave it a California Rare Plant Rank of 1B.2 (1B plants are rare, threatened, or endangered in California and elsewhere, with most being endemic to our state). Surprisingly, this grass has been found at a few sites in Utah and Oregon, but scientists think it was introduced to those states.
Grasses are often thought to be challenging to identify, because they don’t have showy flowers with colorful petals. However, once you learn their plant parts and how their leaves and inflorescences are organized, your “grass blindness” will disappear. It’s like learning a new language—it just takes a little patience. An excellent book to take you through this process is Agnes Chase’s A First Book of Grasses (a great tome for soothing before-bed reading). Aside from tolerance of saline soils, some of the distinguishing features of alkali grasses (the genus Puccinellia), are that their leaf sheaths are not fused around their stems and the bracts surrounding their flowers (their lemmas) have five equally spaced veins that are parallel to one another all the way to the tip of the bract. The narrow, wind-pollinated inflorescences (arrangement of flowers) of California alkali grass mature from March to May, and at that time you may be able to see the anthers and stigmas within the inflorescence bracts.
Scientists think that the decline of California alkali grass is linked to changes in its habitat, including the alteration of water flows, land converted for farming, development, grazing, and road construction. California alkali grass is difficult to find in places where it was once common—even preserves—sometimes due to changes in how water flows across the land. It has been seen recently at the Livermore Wetlands Preserve north of Springtown in Alameda County. Visit the Rare Plant Inventory to learn more about California alkali grass.
Ellen Dean is Associate Rare Plant Botanist at CNPS, helping complete rare plant profiles. In a previous life, she was an herbarium botanist, performing plant IDs, leading collecting field trips, training students in plant identification, curating the herbarium, and publishing taxonomic papers.
