My Love Affair with Dollar Weed

A patch of dollar weed in a mulched shrub bed:


The leaves are like little green flags marking the location of the creeping rhizome just underground. Dig down through the mulch and hook the white rhizome with your finger. Pull gently. The challenge is to see how much you can pull up without breaking it. The rhizomes have a bit of elasticity.


Each rhizome tip must grow inches in a day. Every little while it sends a leaf up and a cluster of roots out into the soil. Botanically speaking, the rhizome itself is not a root but an underground stem. How does it know just how far under the surface to run? Is this a factor of light, moisture, gravity? Maybe all those and more.


I don't think these pictures show how much fun this is. If you're careful, you can get a lot of weeding done for just a little effort. I like the smell of the decaying mulch as I work, a woodsy smell. I'm usually sorry when there is no more to weed. No matter; in a couple of weeks they'll be more.


This patch is growing in a St. Augustine lawn. It is also sending up blossom heads, one at the site of each leaf. Dollar weed probably gets its name from the leaves, which being shiny and round might be compared to a silver dollar. But lawn service companies say it is called that because it makes them rich. Dollar weed in a lawn is simply the result of over-watering. Less water, and it won't grow. But homeowners still frequently pay to have it killed with herbicides.

Weeds, Dirt, and a Tree

This is my little backyard garden.

Last year I planted a red maple there. It replaces the sweetgum tree that was damaged in the 2004 hurricanes and had to be removed.

Here's what's left of the old stump, now 8 years later:


Today I pulled up a lot of the weeds that had grown over the winter. I love weeds, dead or alive. Alive they keep the life in the soil, and dead they become mulch that protects the soil. Either way, they are good. For now, I remove the majority of them where I want to plant vegetables and flowers. The summer annual weeds will sprout next, and I'll enjoy dealing with them, too. This garden is too small for anything to be a chore. It is all good, and it is all beautiful. Do you notice all the leaves? They are from two mature tree nearby, another sweetgum and another red maple. Worms love turning fallen tree leaves into plant food. I have lots of worms in my garden.