Creeping Meadow Foxtail Alopecurus arundinaceus
Creeping Meadow Foxtail is an introduced perennial grass, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 3 ft and blooms Apr in part shade – shade, with black fruit.
More about this plant
Alopecurus arundinaceus, the creeping meadow foxtail or creeping foxtail, is a rhizomatous perennial species in the Grass family (Poaceae). Native to Eurasia and northern Africa, and widely introduced elsewhere, this sod forming grass is useful as a forage and for erosion control. It flowers between April and July, depending on its location. It grows in damp or saline grasslands and banks of waterways, and on mountains up to 1,200 m. However, according to the United States Bureau of Plant, Alopecurus arundinaceus was found at elevations up to 8500–9500 feet. Wikipedia →
Creeping Meadow Foxtail is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.
Part of why it adapts so well: Creeping Meadow Foxtail is a polyploid complex — multiple chromosome races are on record (2n = 14, 28). Spare genome copies give a plant extra raw material to evolve fast, and polyploidy is a documented correlate of successful plant invasions (te Beest et al. 2012). A labelled association from open cytology (ChromoDB), not a prediction for your specific site.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.5–8.4
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 3+
- Height
- 3 ft
- Spread
- Rapid
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Rhizomatous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Black
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- High browsed readily
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~2 caterpillar species
Alopecurus supports ~2 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Alopecurus in North America, including:
Related plants
More Alopecurus →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (31) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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