Mostly in ponderosa pine or spruce forests and grassy meadows at 6,000 to 10,000 feet but occasional at much lower elevations. Swallen (1942) reported it as low as 2,300 feet, and one collection in the Univeristy of Arizona herbarium, is from Hualpai Valley northeast of Kingman, from saltbush desert shrub association at 3,300 feet. Reported from Apache, Coconino, Mohave, Yavapai, Graham, Gila, Cochise and Pima counties, flowering mostly August to Octdber. Colorado and Utah, south to Texas, Arizona, and Mexico. Pine dropseed is palatable to all types of livestock at least when young and green, and rated as a good, though not excellent, forage species.

Perennial bunchgrass; culms mostly 30 to 70 cm. tall but 15 cm. or less in depauperate forms; leaves glabrous or scabrous, often but not always in a conspicuous basal tuft; sheaths rounded, the uppermost occasionally elongate-inflated and partially enclosing the panicle; ligule short, rounded, appearing as a continuation of the membranous sheath margin; blades narrow, involute, fine and short to rather coarse and long; panicle contracted but loose, mostly 4 to 20 cm. long, with slender, often undulate, erect-spreading branches and branchlets; spikelets one-flowered, 2.5 to 3.8 mm. long, borne on slender, often long pedicels, disarticulating above the glumes; glumes subequal or the first shorter, thin, glabrous, faintly nerved, rounded on the back, oblong, broadly acute or obtuse at the apex; lemma firmer than the glumes and equalling or slightly exceeding the second glume length, three-nerved, the nerves usually densely ciliate-pubescent fearly to the apex, the contral nerve occasionally projecting as a minute mucro; palea pubescent on the nerves, about equalling the lemma.

Image courtesty of: Hitchcock, A.S. (rev. A. Chase). 1950. Manual of the grasses of the United States. USDA Misc. Publ. No. 200. Washington, DC. 1950.