Dallisgrass Paspalum dilatatum
Dallisgrass is an introduced perennial grass, found in Hawaii, the lower 48 states, and the Pacific Basin. It grows to 3 ft and blooms Apr in full sun – part shade, with brown fruit.
Dallisgrass 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: Dallisgrass is a polyploid complex — multiple chromosome races are on record (2n = 40, 65). 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
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 4.9–6.5
- Fertility need
- High
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 7+
- Height
- 3 ft
- Spread
- Slow
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Bunch
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Brown
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- 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 →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~10 caterpillar species
Paspalum supports ~10 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 moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Paspalum in North America, including:
✦ Bees 3 bee visitors
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Dallisgrass :
Wildlife & visitors 55 birds · 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Dallisgrass — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 55 birds species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Paspalum →
How we know this (4) 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.
We place each species on Grime’s competitor–stress-tolerator–ruderal (C–S–R) triangle using the globally-calibrated “StrateFy” method: leaf size drives the competitor score, dense low-area leaves the stress-tolerator score, and thin high-area leaves the ruderal score. The result is a C/S/R percentage mix and one of 19 strategy classes; we show it in plain words and keep the percentages for the curious.
Honest limits: A species-mean strategy from pooled global leaf measurements — a broad ecological signal, not a precise per-plant or per-site value. Derived, never a measured fact.
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 (33) 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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