Palo verde vs feather grass vs house

9 years ago

This garden was here when we moved in and I'm still learning how to care for it. One of the things I like is this palo verde tree by the garage. But I have no idea how to care for it.

Firstly, as you can see in the pic, there are three mexican feather grass bushes around the base of the tree. I don't know if this is a good thing or bad. It looks nice, and the neighborhood cats like hanging out in there. Is this providing beneficial moisture for the tree? Or preventing light from reaching the base? Should I leave the grass or remove it and put something smaller/more sparse?

As for the tree itself, do I need to do anything to control the direction of growth? From the front it looks great and fairly symmetrical. From the side, as in the pic, it looks like it's trying to grow away from the house, and away from the pole that it was strapped to when planted. I assume this is because the sun sets in the direction of that growth. In other words, the photo is oriented true west-east, where east is the house and west is the direction the tree is growing.

Featured Answer

Kathy Yata

9 years ago

My Mexican Feather grass usually seeds extensively in the watered part of the garden but hasn't seeded itself in the dry gardens. It will grow in the patio cracks where as far as I know there's never any water. Might be drainage from watering the pots but I don't think so. Lately I haven't been seeing as many baby plants though.

You can comb the seeded stems to remove most of the seeds. I agree they are a pain to deal with and I think my grasses are about ready to be combed now. Once a year cut back about 6" from the ground so they have fresh green growth but they don't live long anyway.

Deergrass is native and easy going. I have a single seedling, rest were grown from divisions of the mother plant. It's larger and a pain to trim when it gets scruffy.

Another nice grass is Purple Needlegrass, the state grass. It's a small grass that self seeds nicely. Sheds the seeds so the bare flower stems are decorative rather than laying down heavy with seed.

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Comments (7)

hoovb zone 9 sunset 23
9 years ago
If it is the typical Palo verde grown nowadays, which is a hybrid called 'Desert Museum', 'Desert Museum' is listed at a mature width of 20-40'. That means the closest someone should have planted it is 20' away from any structure.

Whoever planted it, planted it too close to the house, looks to be about, what, 4' from the house? It's leaning away from the structure, towards the sun. This is not your fault, but now you have to deal with it. It will continue to lean because it doesn't have room to grow normally. Probably what it will mean is that at some point it will need to be removed, so it will have a shortened life span. It looks large to be moved.

The feather grass won't bother the tree a bit. The tree's only problem is that someone didn't care enough to consider mature size when they planted it.
emmarene9
9 years ago
Not to mention it is not useful to plant any tree directly in front of a window. Many people consider Feather grass as an invasive species.
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Nil13 usda:10a sunset:21 LA,CA (Mount Wash.)
9 years ago
Mexican feather grass is not invasive in CA. It is super aggressive in garden conditions but it can't compete with our native cool season grasses in the wild lands. It just gets smothered. If it doesn't invade wilderness, it's not invasive by definition.
dbtothadb
Original Author
9 years ago
I'll try to find out what variety of palo verde it is.

I may leave the feather grass around the tree for now but will probably replace the rest of it in the yard. I've read various accounts around the internet about whether it is invasive. Either way, it is very aggressive at producing seeds and is getting rather large for what we want. The real dealbreaker for me is that the seed-string-things intermingle with the wood chip ground cover by the millions, and are hard to get up without clearing a pile of chips with it. I think they are also a problem because when weeding the baby ones, it pulls a ton of soil from the very dry hillside. I can't imagine this is good for erosion protection over many years.
wcgypsy
9 years ago
I don't consider Nasella tenuissima invasive, it does reseed quite a bit, but so do many other things that I grow. I weed out what I don't want, just like anything else that re-seeds. It's one of my all-time favorites, enhancing / framing anything and everything that it grows with. It is the main repeating theme of my garden and I will never be without it.
faerygardener z7 CA
9 years ago
PlantRight added Mexican Feather grass to their list of invasives and offers alternatives http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=14457. Cal IPC (the California Invasive Plant council) has it on their watch list as high risk with the notation that to date CA populations have not spread aggressively and has not put it on their CA Invasive list http://www.cal-ipc.org/ip/inventory/pdf/Watch_plants.pdf . Cal IPC http://cal-ipc.org keeps an online copy of CA invasives plus the watchlist, always a quick easy check.