隐穗薹草 yin sui tai cao

Rhizome long, woody, covered with dark brown fibrous remnants of basal sheaths. Flowering culms arising from axils of leaves, 12-30 cm tall, compressed trigonous, scapelike, flaccid. Leaves longer than culm, blades 6-15 mm wide, flat, smooth, leathery, margins scabrid. Involucral bracts bristlelike, sheathed, sheath 5-15 mm. Spikes 6-10, nearly all (at least terminal one) androgynous, oblong or cylindric, 8-25 mm, loosely flowered; male part short, 3-5 mm; peduncle 7-25 mm, slender. Female glumes pale brown to yellow-green, ovate-oblong, ca. 2.2 mm, costa green, apex acute or mucronate. Utricles yellow-green, longer than glume, oblong-rhombic to obovate-fusiform, obscurely trigonous, 4-5 mm, membranous, densely puberulent above and ciliate on margins, many veined, base cuneate, with a stipe ca. 1 mm, apex attenuate into a short beak, orifice minutely 2-toothed. Nutlets trigonous, rhombic, 2.5-3 mm, faces excavated in both upper and lower parts, angles constricted at middle; style base persistent, bent; stigmas 3. Fl. winter, fr. next spring.

Wet places in dense forests; 100-1200 m. Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Taiwan [Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam; Australia].