Timber Oatgrass Danthonia intermedia
Timber Oatgrass is a perennial grass native to Alaska, Canada, and the lower 48 states. It grows to 1.5 ft and blooms May in full sun – part shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Danthonia intermedia is a species of grass known by the common names timber oatgrass, intermediate oatgrass, and mountain wild-oat grass. This clumping erect perennial grass is native to North America, where it is widespread across most of Canada and along the western United States into California. It is a plant of the plains as well as forested, mountainous, alpine environments. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 6–7.8
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Height
- 1.5 ft
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Bunch
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Brown
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~1 caterpillar species
Danthonia supports ~1 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Danthonia in North America, including:
Across 147 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Timber Oatgrass, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Danthonia →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (31) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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