Green Needlegrass
Nassella viridula
Green needlegrass is the mild-mannered needlegrass: it carries the same sharp-tipped seed and twisting awn as needle-and-thread, but the awn is far shorter and finer, so it does not work its way into wool and hide the way its relative does and the plant stays useful as forage through seed set. It is a cool-season bunchgrass that greens up very early on the northern plains, well ahead of the warm-season grasses, and it holds green into fall in a wet year. That schedule is what makes it valuable rangeland — high in protein when little else has started — and it is among the most widely seeded natives for pasture restoration in the Dakotas and Montana. Its seed is notoriously slow and erratic to germinate, often needing a year of after-ripening or a cold moist period, which is the main obstacle to establishing it. It prefers heavier ground, clay and loam over sand, and takes drought once its roots are down. Sparrows and longspurs take the seed.
- Family
- Poaceae
- Type
- grass
- Lifespan
- perennial
- Height
- 2.5–2.5 ft
- Spacing
- 0.5–1 ft apart
- Light
- sun
- Soil moisture
- moist
- Soil pH
- neutral, alkaline
- Bloom
- April, May
- Bloom colors
- yellow
- Wildlife value
- songbirds
- Landscape uses
- border, naturalizing
- Native states
- AZ, CA, CO, IA, ID, IL, KS, MN, MT, ND, NE, NM, NY, SD, UT, WI, WY