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; best planted in mass to form a dense carpet.

Form & Character: Unbridled, free flowering, delicate, 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 inches to 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.