Pronounciation: Me-lam-PO-dee-um le-u-CAN-thum

Hardiness zones
Sunset 1-3, 10-13
USDA 4-11

Landscape Use: Excellent accent border or edging plant for dry landscape plantings and rock gardens close to sidewalks and footpaths; best planted in groups to form a dense carpet.

Form & Character: Unbridled, free flowering, delicate, vulnerable, wirey, low and submissive.

Growth Habit: Short-lived herbaceous perennial, slowly forms a mound 1.5-feet tall by 2-feet wide.

Foliage/Texture: Leaves are narrow gray, linear to lanceolate, opposite, simple to undulate; medium fine texture.

Flowers & Fruits: White ray flowers with yellow center, obovate to oblong achene fruit.

Seasonal Color: Blooms mostly fall and spring.

Temperature: Tolerant of Phoenix heat and cold.

Light: Full sun with some protection from the searing Phoenix western summer sun.

Soil: Fast-draining soil is absolutely necessary for best amenity performance!

Watering: Infrequently irrigate and give no water during winter, regular and frequent irrigations make this plant unattractively vegetative and rangy (flowering effect is diminished).

Pruning: Little to none required, except to head back to rejuvenate if plants become a little rangy or wirey.

Propagation: Seed

Disease and Pests: Prone to root rot fungi if soil is poorly drained.

Additional comments: This is a fine-textured, small and prostrate accent plant for desert gardens that is best used in mass placed 18 to 30 inches on center. Does not tolerate foot traffic. Its popularity, presence/absence in Phoenix landscapes seems to have ebbed and flowed back and forth over the years. Melampodium paludosum (bush zinnia) is very popular in the eastern United State as a landscape yellow flowering diminuative perennial for garden borders.