Slender wild oat
Avena barbata
Family · Poaceae · Harmless
The wild oat that fills fields, fallows and verges with open loose panicles of large spikelets hanging downwards, each with a bent twisted awn that moves as humidity changes.
Roadsides and waste ground · Fields and pasture · Scrubland · Town and roadside
Also known asbearded oat, wild oat
How to tell it
Half a metre to a metre and a half. The panicle is open and hangs on all sides, and each spikelet is two to three centimetres without the awns, which are dark, bent at the middle and twisted at the base. Each grain has a round scar at its base and a tuft of reddish hairs, the sign that separates it from cultivated oats. On drying, the awn twists and untwists with humidity and drills the grain into the soil.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
It is the classic weed of cereal fields and is grazed green as forage. The grain is small and husked and has no practical human food use.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.