Perennial reed, with creeping rhizomes. Culms erect, 1.5-3(6) m high. Leaf-blades 20-60 cm (or more) long and 8-32 mm wide, glabrous, smooth beneath, the tips filiform and flexuous (sometimes stiff and pungent, see below). Panicle 20-30(-50) cm long and 6-10(-15) cm wide, the lowest node usually few-branched, some of the branches bearing spikelets nearly to their base. Spikelets 12-18 mm long, the rhachilla-hairs 6-10 mm long, copious, silky; lower glume 3-4.5 mm long; upper glume lanceolate, 5-9 mm long, sharply acute, usually apiculate; lowest lemma linear lanceolate to linear-oblong, 8-15 mm long; fertile lemmas very narrowly lanceolate, 9-13 mm long.

Fl. & Fr. Per.: July-October.

Type: Australia, Nee (MA).

Distribution: Pakistan (Punjab & Kashmir); temperate regions of both hemispheres in the Old World and the New.

Plants with short, convolute, pungent leaf-blades and sheaths less than 3 cm long have been separated as var. stenophylla (Boiss.) Bor. Clayton (1967), however, has pointed out that shoots displaying this habit can occasionally be found growing from normal plants of both this species and Phragmites karka, and for this reason the variety is hardly worthy of recognition.

Common or Ditch Reed is found on limestone slopes in open forest in the mountains, margins of lakes and ponds and in shallow water in the plains.