Oxalis: clever clovers called false shamrocks
29 May, 2008 By: Landscape Management Staff LDB Solutions Image courtesy Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center/North America |
Here’s a bit of luck for consumers who’ve flipped for Oxalis, the small rounded lucky clover plants also known as wood sorrel or false shamrock. Now oxalis come in many colors with pinwheels of foliage in green, deep purple, maroon, chocolate, caramel, speckled emerald green or bi-colors. Their flowers come in white, soft pink, bright pink or deep rose and yellow.
This time of year, oxalis are widely available at as bare bulbs or potted bedding plants. Like four-leaved clovers, oxalis feature lobed leaves arranged in whorls, with either three or four leaves radiating off a center stem. Typically about 8 inches tall, they thrive in partial shade, yet don’t mind sun, blooming steadily from early summer to frost.
Foliage is what oxalis are all about, though their small flowers are a bonus. Used as a groundcover, edging or low textural accents, oxalis excel as supporting actors in the summer landscape. They’re best used as stage dressing not as star players.
Image courtesy Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center/North America
In layered plantings, where various plants are played off one another, oxalis is often featured in the understory, where it nicely fills low bare spaces beneath the higher bigger leaves of taller plants. In low broad pots, oxalis thrives, soon spilling over pot edges. Potted oxalis can be used as tabletop planters or tucked into the plantings of bigger potted plants to provide surface interest.
At summer’s end, oxalis can be moved indoors.
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