Plants perennial, cespitose, 10-100 cm; rhizomes absent. Culms erect or excurved, leafy, obscurely trigonous, slender, firm. Leaves shorter than culms; blades spreading to ascending, linear, proximally flat, 2-4 mm wide, apex involute, then trigonous, subulate. Inflorescences: spikelet clusters 1-4, loose to dense, broadly turbinate, lobed or hemispheric; peduncles and branches ascending; leafy bracts exceeding proximal, sometimes distal, clusters. Spikelets light red brown, ellipsoid or narrowly ovoid, 4-5 mm, apex acute to acuminate; fertile scales broadly ovate, 3.5-4.5 mm, apex acute or acuminate, apiculate. Flowers: perianth bristles mostly 6, reaching from fruit midbody to tubercle tip or beyond, antrorsely barbellate. Fruits 1(-2) per spikelet, 2.5-3 mm; body dark brown, broadly, tumidly obovoid, 2-2.5 × 2-2.5 mm, apically buttressed to tubercle; surfaces finely transversely rugulose or nearly level, with fine transverse rows of pits or low papillae, often appearing nearly smooth; tubercle low conic, 0.4-0.6 mm, apiculate.

Fruiting spring-summer. Sandy pinelands and sandhills, particularly in longleaf pine type; 0-300 m; Ala., Fla., Ga., La., Miss., N.C., S.C., Tex., Va.; West Indies.

Of all North American species of Rhynchospora, R. grayi appears best adapted to the xeric conditions found in the coarser sands of the longleaf pine-scrub oak-dominated yellow sandhills. Interestingly, it seems seldom to mix with its closest relative, R. megalocarpa, which is more often found in white sandhills.

Cespitose, 3-8 dm; lvs flat, 2-3 mm wide; infl of 1-3 terminal and subterminal, hemispheric to subglobose glomerules, with 1-3 remote, slenderly peduncled lateral glomerules; spikelets lanceolate to narrowly ovoid, 4-6 mm, with 2-3 fls and 1 fr; bristles 6, antrorsely barbellate, shorter to longer than the achene; achenes olivaceous to nearly black, broadly elliptic to rotund, much thickened distally, 2.1-2.6 mm, nearly or quite as wide, finely marked with numerous pits; tubercle conic, not flattened, 0.3-0.8 mm. Wet sandy soil on the coastal plain; se. Va. to Fla., Tex., and Cuba.

Gleason, Henry A. & Cronquist, Arthur J. 1991. Manual of vascular plants of northeastern United States and adjacent Canada. lxxv + 910 pp.

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