I forgot about sea oat grass. In many fishing trips to the Outer Banks of NC, I'd always loved the beautiful seed heads gently blowing in the ocean breezes, the tassels glowing silvery against the sky. Then I bought the stuff, multiple times. The seeds packets I picked up in tourist trap gift shops never took, and I eventually bought a plant somewhere in NC.
I can attest that the seed heads are not as attractive in the relative calm of my gardens in the middle of the woods. They spread like wildfire, creating a wirey mat of roots that chokes out my beloved beebalm and anything else it encounters. They are tricky too! My husband will pull and pull the sprouts, but they break off easily from the root mass, so he really is amazed to find new sprouts back, just as thick (if not more), a day or two later.
Use one of those weed-devils that you twist to weed -- the root mass is so tough the twisting motion rips them and every other thing in a 6" circle (more beebalm gone...) but it curtails the growth for a few weeks. I guess if I could get every millimeter of root segment from the ground, that would be the end of it, maybe not.
A friend who is a horticulturist, now retired from Burpee, said it would not be as aggressive in shade. I moved the main masses to a shady bed, and it has behaved in a more gentlemanly manner, but then it has only been there a couple of years -- it may be saving up its strength to wipe out the entire forest land acreage of Sussex county.
I continue to pull roots from its previous bed, though there are only a few thousand shoots of the grass this spring. Wish my hellebores were as prolific!
