Xyris
(an old Greek name used by Dioscorides for Iris faetidissima). Yellow-eyed Grass of North America. ORD. Xyrideae. A genus comprising about forty species of stove, greenhouse, or hardy, perennial or rarely annual, Rush-like herbs, broadly dispersed over the warmer regions of the globe. Flower-heads globose, ovoid, or rarely hemispherical or shortly cylindrical; sepals petaloid, very broad, more or less distinctly three-nerved; corolla lobes ovate; staminodes often three. Leaves radical, linear, rigid or Grass-like, tufted or distichous, surrounding the scape. X. operculata, the only species worth describing here, thrives in light, rich soil. It may be increased by divisions of the root.
X. operculata (covered). fl.-heads ovoid to globular, four to six lines in diameter, the scales black; scapes slender, 1ft. to 1 1/2ft. high, inclosed at base in a rather long sheath without any lamina, in the centre of the tuft of leaves. June. Sheaths shining brown, some of them produced into very narrow, almost subulate leaves, mostly less than 6in. long. Australia, 1804. Stove perennial. (B. M. 1158; L. B. C. 205.)