Weed Indentification - Wild Strawberry or Common Mallow and the Winner Is
Ask the Expert: what is this plant
this plant is all over my yard I thought it was strawberry but its not. its really dark with a reddish tint.
I Believe this is a Common Mallow (Malva neglecta)
I found this Common Mallow Photo on a Michigan State University site. You can see the similarity in the leaf.
Ronald Calhoun in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Michigan State University supplied this picture. In fact, it comes from the MSU Turf Weed.net program. This is a wonderful resource for weed identification and was developed to assist MSU turf students earn the key identification characteristics of common and not-so-common turfgrass weeds found in Michigan and the midwest. Ronald has compiled a variety of useful weed identification pictures including wild strawberry, henbit and Carolina geranium.
March 10th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
If this plant is all over their yard then there probably isn’t a lot of grass in their yard. As the Latin name indicates: if you neglecta your yard you getta the mallow. This is a situation where some judicious fertilization would go a long way to improving the growing conditions for the turf so that it can better compete with weeds like mallow.