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Poaceae family

Virginia Wildrye Elymus virginicus

Native
Deer favourite — Rated highly palatable to browsing deer — so where deer are around, expect this one to get nibbled. It's a documented preference, not a certainty: pressure swings with the place and season, and a fenced or low-deer yard may be untouched.

Virginia Wildrye is a perennial grass native to Canada, the lower 48 states, and Saint-Pierre & Miquelon. It grows to 2.5 ft and blooms Mar in full sun, with brown fruit.

More about this plant

Elymus virginicus is a perennial bunchgrass located in Virginia and the eastern United States. Virginia wild rye is one of the few cool season native grasses found in the east Texas area. It is extremely palatable to livestock and will decrease without proper grazing management. It spreads via seed and tillering. It can be confused with Canadian wild rye which is a more robust plant with longer awns. It should be cut early in the season when used for hay to avoid ergot contamination. Northern Missouri Germplasm Virginia wild rye was released in 1999 by the Missouri Plant Material Center for use in northern Missouri. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
USDA PLANTS — Sun · Soil & moisture
USDA — SoilPH — Soil pH
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Fertility Requirement / Soil Adaptation — Fertility need · Adapts to
USDA — Temp-Min °F — Hardiness
Sun
Full sun
Soil & moisture
Medium moisture
Soil pH
5–7
Fertility need
Medium
Adapts to
Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
Hardiness
USDA zone 5+
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Height, Mature — Height
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Growth Rate / Spread / Growth Form / Lifespan / Active Growth Period / Seed Period — Spread · Growth rate · Growth form · Active growth
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0) · USDA PLANTS — Foliage
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Fruit/Seed Color / Fruit Persistence — Fruit
Height
2.5 ft
Spread
None — clumping
Growth rate
Moderate
Growth form
Bunch
Lifespan
Perennial · short-lived
Foliage
Broadleaf · coarse texture
Active growth
Spring
Fruit
Brown
In the garden
Sources · In the garden
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Propagation Method / Commercial Availability — Propagate by · In the trade
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Germination (cold stratification) — Seed starting
USDA PLANTS — Seed Period — Seeds ripen
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Foliage Texture / Browse Palatability / Resprout — Deer browsing · Resprouts if cut
Propagate by
Seed
Seed starting
No stratification needed
Seeds ripen
Spring – Summer seed-collection / harvest window
In the trade
Routinely available
Deer browsing
High browsed readily
Resprouts if cut
No
Herb layer — Sits in the herb of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
High-nutrient foliage — Above-average measured leaf nitrogen — its prunings make rich compost and mulch (the measured stand-in for folklore "dynamic accumulator" lists).Open guide →
Rain garden / bioswale — Rated FACW on the wetland list — tolerates wet feet, so it suits the soggy zone of a rain garden or bioswale that catches and filters runoff.Open guide →
derived roles
The garden year bloom → fruit → fall colour
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Bloom
Bloom (the flower's colour)
Bloom · Mar — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — BloomPeriod
When to sow · for your area

Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.

Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
❧ Caterpillar hosts ~31 caterpillar species

Elymus supports ~31 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 strong genus.

Recorded feeding on Elymus in North America, including:

Apamea devastator · Glassy Cutworm ✦ Elachista leucofrons · grass-miner moth ✦ Leucania phragmitidicola · Phragmites Wainscot ✦ Leucania pseudargyria · False Wainscot ✦ Nephelodes minians · Bronzed Cutworm ✦ Agrotis orthogonia · Pale Western Cutworm
+ 8 more species →
Apamea lignicolora · Wood-Colored Apamea Apamea lutosa · owlet moth Asymmetrura graminivorella Benjaminiola colorada · owlet moth Cosmiotes illectella · grass-miner moth Elachista epimicta · grass-miner moth Elachista orestella · grass-miner moth Elachista praelineata · grass-miner moth
Keystone count (genus-level) from Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use records. Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0). ✦ = recorded on this exact species.
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
Frequently grows with

Across 97 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Virginia Wildrye, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.

Virginia Creeper · 77% Eastern Poison Ivy · 77% Saw Greenbrier · 69% Sugarberry · 60% Japanese Honeysuckle · 59% Green Ash · 57% Sweetgum · 55% Chinese Privet · 54%
"%" = share of this plant's plots that also held the species. From sPlotOpen → (Sabatini et al. 2021, CC BY 4.0) — open vegetation plots: wild community composition, not garden design.
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
Photosynthesis Direct fact

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.

Kattge, J. et al. TRY plant trait database — Categorical Traits Dataset (2012).
Climate niche (heat tolerance & native rainfall) Derived

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.

Realized-niche / climate-envelope approach (Pearson & Dawson 2003; Soberón 2007). Climate: NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals (1991–2020).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (32) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[17] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[18] Wetland indicator — USACE National Wetland Plant List (2022)
[20] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[21] Ecological value — Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use counts
[22] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[24] Functional traits — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[25] Photosynthetic pathway — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[26] Climate niche — Derived — realized climate niche from U.S. county occurrences (GBIF) × NOAA NCEI county climate normals 1991–2020 (public domain)
[29] Caterpillar host count — Warren II 2026 (Dryad, CC0) · Tallamy host-use counts
[30] Caterpillar species — NHM HOSTS (CC0)
[31] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
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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