By Brad Wier. A wet spring has welcomed a host of warm-season volunteers to your yard.
Recent rain and the longest days of the year make great growing conditions not just for WaterSaver plants but for any volunteers — aka weeds — growing in the wrong place.
Whether you’ve started mowing this season or not, you may see landscapes looking unusually lush or completely overrun by opportunistic growth. If your winter weeds are long gone and you’re looking to put a name to your new groundcovers, the following menu may get you started.
- Three-lobe false mallow (Malvastrum coromandelianum) deserves a bigger and better name. It could easily be called “false horseherb” after the native groundcover it resembles, since this lawn mallow often grows in the same locations and superficially resembles it. However, this perennial’s buttercup-yellow afternoon blooms look larger, and the plant is taller and coarser – and greener in summer. Its seeds can attach to passing animals and socks, and the roots are long and tenacious, making established plants more difficult to pull (except after rains). It crowds easily into rough edges of the lawn and landscape beds. A larval host for checkered skipper butterflies, it makes a “better than mud” mowable groundcover that’s quite common in San Antonio lawns after seven years of drought.
- Texas nightshade (Solanum triquetrum) This highly variable plant can be found growing under and inside just about anything, equally at home in landscape beds, lawns, fence lines and woodlands. The tiny tomato-like fruits are not tasty, but the flowers are highly fragrant. Given a chain link fence to climb on, this local specialty can climb up to 7 feet or more, and the flowers and fruits can appear in both winter and summer.
- Tropical amaranth (Amaranthus polygonoides) A short sunny annual with greenish-yellow flower clusters and, usually, a distinctive pale chevron or “watermark” on young leaves. Many amaranths are touted as ancient grains and this locally native variety is reportedly served in South Asia, as the leaves and seeds are both nutritious.
- Green poinsettia (Euphorbia dentata) No need to wait ‘til December — there are probably wild poinsettias already celebrating in the landscape dressed entirely in green. Often a weed of irrigated landscape beds (where it can hide in the shadows of other plants) you may find this toothed spurge’s pale green flowers and tiny fruit clusters standing right out in the open after recent rains.
- Red spiderling (Boerhavia coccinea) Among the 40 species of closely related tar vines, the scarlet spiderling is somewhat eye-catching, especially when the loosely sprawling (and sticky) stems reach up to a meter in length, tipped by tiny but showy spiderling flowers. The young leaves and shoots are edible. Boerhavia is a near-native, though its distribution is now cosmopolitan (from Central America to Australia). It grows happily in disturbed soil and waste places along curbs and asphalt edges, and in many a drought-hardened lawn.
Many of these have been present throughout the recent drought, where — when mowed — they may comprise the bulk of the blank green canvas that stands in for a lawn in a San Antonio summer.
I’m always shopping around native weeds for the next miracle groundcover, but none of these are widely touted — yet.
Without regular mowing, their height and vigorous spread tend to erase the usual distinctions between turf, groundcover and landscape beds.
On the bright side, none require special efforts to eliminate. And they’re nowhere near as tough as Bermuda grass, nutsedge or sandbur. Rather, they’re all great examples of native weeds easily controlled by regular mowing — and hand-pulling while soils are still moist.
Brad Wier is a SAWS conservation planner. Years in South Texas landscaping and public horticulture gave him a lasting enthusiasm for native plants that don’t die when sprinklers — and gardeners — break down. He’d rather save time and water for kayaking and tubing. He is a former kilt model, and hears hummingbirds.