Sheep's-fescue - Festuca ovina

Tufted grass without rhizomes or runners, 5 to 40 cm tall. All leaves are bristle like, rough 3 to 15 cm long and 0.5 cm wide. Inflorescence 2 to 12 cm long, erect.  The young leaves on tillers have sheaths not fused near apex but with overlapping margins, and some or all of the tillers are intravaginal (i.e. arise parallel to the parent shoot, and being enclosed by it for some distance).

Festuca rubra and other fine-leaved fescues

The young leaves on tillers have sheaths not fused near apex but with overlapping margins

Some or all of the tillers are intravaginal (i.e. arise parallel to the parent shoot, and being enclosed by it for some distance).

Check the leaf-sheaths of young leaves on tillers.  The County Recorder has asked for a specimen of this plant to be retained for verification

Drier grassland.

May and June.

Perennial.

Fairly frequent but local in most of Britain and scarcer in the east of England.

Fairly frequent in Leicestershire and Rutland. In the 1979 Flora survey of Leicestershire it was found in 123 of the 617 tetrads.

C. A. Stace, A.-K. K. A. al-Bermani & M. J. Wilkinson  (1992) The distinction between the Festuca ovina L. and Festuca rubra L. aggregates in the British Isles.  Watsonia 19. 107-112.  Avaialbe from BSBI Archive https://archive.bsbi.org.uk/Wats19p107.pdf