Saltgrass Distichlis spicata
Saltgrass is a perennial grass native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 1.1 ft and blooms Jul in part shade – shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Distichlis spicata is a species of grass known by several common names, including seashore saltgrass, inland saltgrass, and desert saltgrass. This grass is native to the Americas, where it is widespread. It can be found on other continents as well, where it is naturalized. It is extremely salt tolerant. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 6.4–10
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Height
- 1.1 ft
- Spacing
- 1–2 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Moderate
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Rhizomatous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring through autumn
- Fruit
- Brown
- Propagate by
- Sprigs
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~3 caterpillar species
Distichlis supports ~3 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 Distichlis in North America, including:
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Saltgrass — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 163 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Saltgrass, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Distichlis →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
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 (35) 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).
Loading…
BibTeX
Loading…