Tanglehead Heteropogon contortus
Tanglehead is a perennial grass native to Hawaii, the lower 48 states, and Puerto Rico. It grows to 0.7 ft and blooms Jun in part shade – shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Heteropogon contortus is a tropical, perennial tussock grass with a native distribution encompassing Southern Africa, southern Asia, Northern Australia, Oceania, and southwestern North America. The species has also become a naturalised weed in tropical and subtropical regions in the Americas and East Asia. The plant grows to 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) in height and is favoured in most environments by frequent burning. The plants develop characteristic dark seeds with a single long awn at one end and a sharp spike at the other. The awn becomes twisted when dry and straightens when moistened, and in combination with the spike is capable of drilling the seed into the soil. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 6–8
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 8+
- Height
- 0.7 ft
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Bunch
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Brown
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Contract growing only
- Deer browsing
- Medium moderately palatable
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →Wildlife & visitors 2 mammals
Open records of who else uses Tanglehead — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 2 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse):
Related plants
More Heteropogon →
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 (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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