Water Bent - Polypogon viridis

A sturdy grass with dense but interrupted panicles of pale green to purplish flowers, with one floret per spikelet, the glumes and lemma without awns. The branches are very crowded. Trailing stems, 60 to100 cm, rooting at nodes. Ligule is oblong with a lobed membrane.

Creeping Bent, Agrostis stolonifera

The panicle is branched. Each spikelet contains only one floret usually completely enclosed by its glumes. The inflorescence branches close together after flowering, and have closely spaced spikelets which are not awned. It is in a different genus from Creeping Bent, with even more crowded spikelets that sometimes lead to the description that the panicle is lobed.

Please provide a photograph to support your record.

Found as a casual on tips and damp waste ground, it is spreading as a weed of nurseries, gardens and pavement cracks often favouring main roads and urban areas.

Flowering June to September.

A short-lived, stoloniferous perennial, often flowering in first year.

An alien that is swiftly spreading in Britain.

Increasingly common in Leicestershire and Rutland. It was not recorded in the 1979 Flora survey of Leicestershire.