Dollar weed at SPVCA by Amy Howard
Don’t laugh. As of this writing, someone on eBay in Virginia is selling 20 live dollar weeds for $29.99. That is MORE than a dollar per dollar weed! Is that what is happening to our economy? Even the Dollar Tree dollar store bumped their price to $1.25. An Etsy seller in California advertises a small pot of dollar weed for $16.95. Is that 16 weeds? Oh, wait. The plant is named for its resemblance of a silver dollar, not for its native price.
Aren’t we lucky in tropical Florida? The spirit of dollar weed has existed here since the earth was formless and empty. All we have to do is water our lawn too much. The spirit will rise up and pepper our yard with tiny green umbrellas. It’s so free, we should be using its Florida Plant Atlas name, marshPENNYwort.
But no. We’d rather have things a little more orderly. I’ve been blindly pulling these long strands of green dollars out of the SPVCA flower beds for several years and so have many other SPVCA diehards.
But this native garden project has inspired me to stop and smell the weeds. Man are those green coins cute. The rich, lush green. The perky way they pop up. The doting way they lean toward the sun. They give shade to a mole and landing pad to a butterfly. They are even fair game for our leafy greens if the economy collapses. What can we do to show some respect for our native dollar weed?
We can make mini Monet lily ponds. We can let a river of them run down a trench. They are really good at spilling over the edge of a pot as if they were at a bistro in Italy. This neighbor of the Ponte Vedra synagogue has a million-dollar-weed outdoor carpet.
At SPVCA, dollar weed seems to like our little stone wall. Isn’t that sweet?
Can we keep the dollar weed? Pretty please? I’ll do my best to keep it groomed.