Let’s start at the end since garden initiation and progress photos can be sparse and ugly. The end, the goal is prettier. Process, and the story follows later. But first, enjoy a few photos of beautiful, useful frog fruit as a lawn. Here’s a photo of Tom standing on a frog fruit lawn;
And here are some pretty and informative photos of frog fruit;
What is Frog Fruit?
A trailing or clambering vine, it’s in the Verbena family, so it has tiny verbena-like flowers of mostly white.
In the above photos, you can see 1) frog fruit in flower hanging over a wall and 2) It’s tough enough to take over asphalt that bakes in Zone 8 full sun. 3) When unmown, it climbs on itself, making a foot-tall mound.
Frog fruit thrives in full sun and moist to normal soils. It tolerates extreme heat stress and drought but it can go brown in drought. It does go brown in the winter.
Alternative Lawns
It’s trendy, once again, to plant mowable plants in lieu of grass. In the past, in the South anyway, that’s nothing new. My family’s home lawn has been a mix of about 30 different species since the 1930s.
It’s a great idea. In one garden, photo below, we’ve used frog fruit for lawns mixed with Korean violet and other creepers. The philosophy is mow-what-grows. In other places, we’ve tried to keep a frog fruit mono-culture. That is more difficult but doable.
The Challenging Job We Faced Recently
“It was more flub than flip. That was clear from the car window. You’d think a house flipper would clean up the front yard a bit. But no. The first thing you saw were two thick, mostly dead trees standing on uneven ground full of rubble and roots,” Tom’s analysis of the front was spot on. Anybody trying to see the house or visit had to walk all the way around the sidewalk planting strip— the hell strip.
When my sister-in-law decided to move back to Columbia after 30 years of living near Atlanta’s Rodeo Drive, Tom and I wanted to help ease the transition. The front yard, hell strip, and wonky, flooding walkway came first.
Here’s a before pic. This is what the “Flipper/Flubber” considered nice street appeal;
Once the trees were gone, we chopped out roots and leveled the ground with shovels. Then, we discussed different, typical groundcovers as well as how much work and time each would take to establish and maintain.
Frog fruit won the day because:
It doesn’t require irrigation.
It will grow equally well in the full sun as it does in the part shade cast by the 2 remaining trees.
It is very fast to cover.
It’s walkable.
Lots of insects use it, including bee flies and butterflies. Though we’ll mow it, so it won’t flower. Sorry, nectar seekers, nothing for you. But that doesn’t stop larvae and other insects that eat the leaves. For this small space, that’s a nice, feel-good but ecologically minor benefit.
It’s cheap. In fact, in this case, it was free.
The Planting Process
We used hard rakes to smooth and slightly till the soil. No fertilizer or amendments were added. From an existing stand of frog fruit, we pulled up runners and laid them on top of the soil. We watered heavily with a hose and then mulched with cheap bagged wood mulch.
The long runners were a tangle of stems and leaves with few roots. We didn’t try to straighten or orient them with leaves up, roots down, or anything like that. We teased the tangles apart and laid them on the soil.
Tom’s sister agreed to water by hand, with a hose, once a week. Three weeks later, the stems are rooted in. Roots grow from the nodes. And the leaves are growing upward.
The next step is pruning. Since the stems naturally want to grow upward, we need to snip them. We want to encourage lateral growth, which will make a thick mat. So, with clippers or scissors, we’ll snip all the tips. In a larger planting, you could do this with a weed eater.
After a month or so, we’ll be able to use the lawn mower, a manual-powered reel mower, for care. I’ll probably add a handful of fertilizer then, too, and there may be some summer weeding. We expect to have a dense mat of frog fruit by early July, like the frog fruit/Korean violet lawn in this photo:
Click here to Order Frogfruit
Frog fruit is Native to Coastal South Carolina
But this planting is in Columbia, SC, which is the top of a Sandhill. Frog fruits are not native here. In fact, nothing at all is native to a hell strip between two endless pads of concrete in a neighborhood that was laid out in 1904. It’s a great choice. But other choices were great, too. Turf would have worked. Asian Jasmine too. The evolutionary origins of a plant don’t make it any better or worse for this situation.
I’ve promoted native plants since the 1980s. But I am careful to acknowledge that we must choose plants that work for many functions, regardless of where they originated.
In popular media today, memes and generalizations about native and invasive plants run rampant. Those do no good to the cause that we all support. If you are interested in real discussion about native and invasive plants, in honing your vocabulary, and in getting the latest takes on where ecological scientific thinking is going, please join us.
On June 9, nationally acclaimed speaker and scientist Carol Reese will be on our farm for an in-depth day of discussion. Learn More and Register Here.
Did not know something called frog fruit exists in this world. Now I do. Big thanks!
You constantly amaze me.