Every Common Lawn Weed — Identified & Beaten

Taraxacum officinale

Bright yellow flower on a leafless stem, with a rosette of jagged, deeply-lobed leaves at the base.

Trifolium repens

Low-growing plant with three rounded leaflets and white or pink round flower heads.

Stellaria media / Cerastium vulgatum

Soft, hairy, low-growing mat with small oval leaves and tiny white flowers; mouse-ear is fuzzier and more persistent.

Lamium amplexicaule

Upright plant, 12–18 inches tall, with heart-shaped leaves and small purple or pink flowers clustered at the top.

Glechoma hederacea

Creeping vine with small, round, scalloped leaves and small purple flowers; spreads via runners that root at nodes.

Euphorbia maculata

Low-growing mat of reddish stems with tiny oval leaves and small white or reddish flowers; bleeds milky sap when broken.

Plantago major

Rosette of thick, oval, deeply-veined leaves with parallel ridges; tall flower stalk with a dense, pencil-like seed spike.

Cirsium arvense

Spiky, deeply-lobed purple leaves with prickly margins and purple-pink thistle flowers; grows 2–4 feet tall.

Viola sororia

Heart-shaped leaves with small purple, white, or blue flowers; spreads via runners and seeds.

Oxalis stricta

Clover-like leaves with three heart-shaped leaflets (often reddish underneath); small yellow or pink flowers followed by seed pods that explode when touched.

Hydrocotyle spp.

Shiny, round or disk-shaped leaves on long petioles (leaf stems), resembling small coins; very low-growing.

Fallopia japonica

Fast-growing, bamboo-like canes 3–10 feet tall with hollow, reddish-speckled stems, broad shovel- or heart-shaped leaves arranged in a zig-zag up the stem, and sprays of small creamy-white flowers in late summer.

Convolvulus arvensis

Twining vine with arrow-shaped leaves and white or pink trumpet-shaped flowers. Wraps around and smothers other plants.

Portulaca oleracea

Low-growing succulent with thick, fleshy, paddle-shaped leaves and reddish stems. Small yellow flowers. Thrives in hot, dry conditions.

Cardamine hirsuta

Small rosette of rounded leaflets with tiny white flowers on upright stems. Seed pods explode when touched, flinging seeds several feet.

Senecio vulgaris

Upright plant with deeply lobed leaves and small yellow flower heads that quickly turn to fluffy white seed puffs (like tiny dandelions).

Capsella bursa-pastoris

Rosette of deeply lobed basal leaves with a tall flower stalk. Small white flowers produce distinctive heart-shaped seed pods along the stem.

Stachys byzantina

Soft, fuzzy, silver-gray leaves that feel like velvet. Sometimes planted intentionally but spreads aggressively via runners.

Diodia virginiana

A low, sprawling mat of shiny dark-green lance-shaped leaves that sit directly opposite each other with no leaf stalk, topped by small white four-petal flowers shaped like a star; the leaves often show a blotchy yellow mottling and it takes over the wettest, soggiest parts of the lawn.

Stachys floridana

An upright mint-family plant with a square hairy stem, opposite lance-shaped leaves with scalloped edges, and pale pink to white trumpet flowers speckled with purple; pull one up and you will find crisp white segmented underground tubers that look exactly like a rattlesnake's rattle, which is the dead giveaway.

Allium vineale / Allium canadense

Thin, dark green, upright spears that shoot up in clumps well above the rest of the lawn in late winter and early spring and smell strongly of onion when crushed or mowed; wild garlic's leaves are round and hollow like a drinking straw, wild onion's are flat and solid.

Toxicodendron radicans

A creeping or climbing woody vine whose leaves always come in groups of three glossy leaflets, the middle one on a longer stalk and the side ones often mitten-shaped, turning red early in fall; Virginia creeper looks similar but has five leaflets, and box elder seedlings have three leaflets that sit opposite each other on the stem instead of alternating.

Rumex crispus

A flat rosette of long narrow leaves, 6 to 12 inches each, with distinctly wavy crinkled edges like a ruffled ribbon and often a reddish-purple tinge, sending up a stiff stalk that turns rusty brown and carries dense clusters of papery three-sided seeds.

Artemisia vulgaris

An upright plant with deeply cut, fern-like leaves that are dark green on top and bright silvery-white and woolly on the underside, giving off a strong sage-like smell when crushed; it looks a lot like a garden chrysanthemum or ragweed, but the white fuzzy leaf underside is the giveaway, and it keeps growing back even under regular mowing.

Bryum argenteum (and other lawn mosses)

A soft, spongy, low green mat of tiny threadlike shoots with no real stems, flowers or roots, sitting straight on bare soil in the shady, damp, thin parts of the lawn — it squashes like a sponge underfoot instead of springing back like grass.

Potentilla indica

A low creeping mat that spreads by runners, with three-part leaves whose edges have rounded, scalloped teeth, small bright YELLOW five-petal flowers, and upright red berries that look like tiny strawberries — true wild strawberry has white flowers, sharper-pointed leaf teeth, and berries that hang down.

Oxalis corniculata

A flat, ground-hugging mat of tiny clover-like leaves — three heart-shaped leaflets that fold down at night — very often tinged purple or bronze, with small yellow five-petal flowers and slim upright pointed seed pods; unlike upright yellow woodsorrel it creeps along the ground and puts down roots wherever a stem node touches soil.

Medicago lupulina

Low sprawling mats of clover-like leaves in groups of three with tiny bright-yellow flower clusters about the size of a pea — unlike white clover, the middle leaflet sits on its own short stalk and the leaves have no pale crescent marking.

Plantago lanceolata

A flat rosette of long, narrow, deeply ribbed leaves that almost look like grass blades, sending up bare stalks tipped with a short brown bullet-shaped seed head — the narrow leaves are what separate it from broadleaf plantain's wide oval ones.

Polygonum aviculare

A tough wiry mat spreading flat from one central point, with small dull blue-green oval leaves and a papery white sheath wrapping the stem at every leaf joint, almost always in hard-packed ground along driveways, sidewalks and worn footpaths.

Malva neglecta

Sprawling plant with nearly round, crinkled leaves that have scalloped edges and sit on long stalks, small white-to-pink five-petal flowers, and flat green seed pods that look like miniature wheels of cheese.

Veronica arvensis / Veronica persica

A low spreading carpet of small scalloped leaves growing in opposite pairs, dotted in early spring with tiny four-petal sky-blue flowers barely wider than a match head, followed by distinctive flat heart-shaped seed pods.

Chenopodium album

An upright, fast-growing summer annual with diamond-to-triangular leaves on ridged stems streaked maroon, shooting three to five feet tall if nothing stops it. The dead giveaway is the coating: young leaves and growing tips look dusted with fine grey-white flour that smears when you rub it — redroot pigweed, its usual lookalike, has no such bloom.

Phyllanthus urinaria

A summer annual that looks uncannily like a tiny mimosa tree seedling — two neat rows of small oblong leaflets along each branchlet, folding shut at night, on reddish branching stems. Flip a branchlet over for the definitive check: rows of small warty green seed capsules sit tight against the underside, and nothing else in a lawn does that.

Asclepias tuberosa

Flat-topped clusters of small, brilliant orange flowers on stiff hairy stems, standing in a tidy knee-high clump in the driest, sunniest, thinnest bit of ground you own. Break a leaf: the sap runs clear and watery, not milky — this is the milkweed without milk — and the leaves spiral alternately up the stem rather than sitting in the opposite pairs almost every other milkweed has.

Symphyotrichum pilosum & S. ericoides

For most of the summer, wild asters hide in a lawn as low clumps of narrow, hairy, gray-green leaves on wiry stems that shrug off mowing — then they erupt in sprays of tiny white daisy-like flowers, about a half inch across with yellow centers: heath aster from as early as August, frost aster from late September, both running through November. They pick on thin, dry, sandy, low-fertility spots. The tell versus look-alike daisy fleabane: fleabane blooms in early summer, asters wait for late summer and fall — a little white daisy flowering in October is an aster. Frost aster and heath aster are genuinely hard to tell apart even for botanists, but genus-level ID is all you need since treatment is identical.

Centaurea stoebe

Starts as a flat, gray-green rosette 1–8 inches across of deeply lobed, rough-hairy leaves — like a dandelion crossed with a small thistle, but with no spines anywhere — then bolts into wiry, many-branched stems 2–4 feet tall carrying small (0.3–0.6 inch) pink-to-purple thistle-like flowers from June into fall. The giveaway is at the base of each flower head: bracts fringed with black tips, like rows of dark upside-down Vs, that make the head look spotted — garden bachelor's button (cornflower) is a related Centaurea but has bigger blue flowers and no black-fringed bracts. Around lawns it favors thin, dry, gravelly ground — driveway margins, curb strips, new-construction soil — and in mowed turf it persists as low rosettes and can even flower below mower height.

Ageratina altissima

A patch-forming perennial, 1 to 5 feet tall, that lives in the shady parts of a yard — under trees, along fences, on the north side of the house — and gets ignored until September–October, when it's suddenly covered in flat-topped clusters of fluffy bright-white flowers at a time almost nothing else white is blooming in shade. Leaves are opposite and coarsely toothed, heart-shaped to ovate low on the plant with three main veins, on smooth branched stems. The tell against the boneset look-alikes: snakeroot's leaves sit on long, slender stalks, while common boneset's are stalkless and fused around the stem (blue mistflower is the same shape with blue flowers).

Erechtites hieraciifolius

American burnweed seems to appear overnight in mid-to-late summer, rocketing from nothing to 3–8 feet (occasionally 10) on a single grooved, brittle stem in mulched beds, fence lines, and thin or unmowed turf. Look for bright-green, fleshy, raggedly toothed leaves that clasp the stem, an unpleasant odor when the foliage is crushed, and its signature flowers: green cigar-shaped heads topped with a bare cream tuft that look permanently about to open into something showy but never do, then burst into dandelion-like white parachute fluff. The tell against horseweed — the other tall late-summer annual — is that horseweed carries tiny, narrow, fuzzy, untoothed leaves and many small daisy-like heads, while burnweed's smooth toothed leaves and never-opening cylinder heads are unmistakable up close. And despite the fireweed nickname, this is not the showy pink fireweed of the West — that is an entirely different plant.

Amaranthus blitoides; Amaranthus retroflexus

Pigweed shows up in yards wearing two faces. Redroot pigweed is the upright one — a rough-hairy summer annual reaching 2 to 3 feet (up to 6 unmowed) with dull-green oval leaves on long stalks, a red-striped lower stem, bristly green bottlebrush seedheads at the stem tips, and the giveaway pink-to-red taproot when you dig one up. Prostrate pigweed is the lawn version: a smooth, hairless mat of reddish stems 1 to 3 feet long radiating in a circle, with small shiny spoon-shaped leaves clustered at the stem tips and tiny green flowers hidden in the leaf axils, appearing mid-summer in thin, new, or disturbed turf and along bed and driveway edges. The tell against its mat-forming look-alikes: snap a stem — pigweed has no milky sap (spotted spurge does), no papery sheath at each joint (prostrate knotweed does), and no fat succulent leaves (purslane does).

Phytolacca americana

A dramatic native perennial that erupts each year from a massive taproot into a shrub-sized plant 4–10 feet tall and 3–5 feet wide: smooth magenta-to-purple stems, big bright-green leaves up to 12 inches long, drooping white-pink flower stalks, and late-summer clusters of glossy purple-black berries on hot-pink stems. It shows up where birds perch — fence lines, under trees, bed edges — not in the middle of a mowed lawn. The tell versus elderberry: elderberry carries its berries in flat, umbrella-shaped clusters on a woody shrub, while pokeweed's hang in grape-like racemes from smooth, fleshy pink stems.

Kummerowia striata (syn. Lespedeza striata)

A wiry, ground-hugging summer annual legume that forms flat, dense mats in the driest, thinnest, low-fertility parts of the lawn — it grows below mower height, so it seldom gets cut. Each dark-green leaf has three small oblong leaflets with parallel veins running nearly at right angles off a prominent midvein; the tough, semi-woody stems carry tiny downward-pointing hairs and rise from a single taproot. Small pink-to-purple pea-like flowers appear singly in the leaf axils in late summer, exactly when it visibly takes over. The tell versus real clover: a wiry, non-succulent "clover" mat that shows up mid-to-late summer and won't pull like clover.

Digitaria sanguinalis

Thick clumps of coarse, yellowish-green grass growing in a star pattern, much coarser than your lawn grass.

Paspalum dilatatum

Coarse, clumpy grass that grows in distinct tufts, 2–4 inches tall, with seed heads that resemble fingers on an open hand (3–6 spikes).

Eleusine indica

Coarse, yellowish-green grass in a low, dense rosette pattern; seed heads radiate like the spokes of a wheel from a central point.

Poa annua

Bright yellow-green, fine-textured grass finer than most turf, with distinctive seed heads that appear papery and light-colored.

Elymus repens

Fine-textured grass similar to perennial ryegrass but coarser; flat, grayish-green leaves; distinctive seed heads with spikelets arranged in a zigzag pattern.

Panicum repens

Coarse grass with broad, somewhat stiff leaves; deep purple or bronze seed heads in summer; spreads via tough underground rhizomes.

Juncus tenuis

Tight little tufts of stiff, wiry, dark-green stems that are perfectly ROUND when you roll one between your fingers (grass is flat, nutsedge is triangular), with two or three thin leaves near the top and small papery brown flower clusters, almost always growing right in the worn track where people, bikes or dogs cut across the lawn.

Cynodon dactylon

Straw-brown patches with defined edges sitting in an otherwise green fescue or bluegrass lawn in autumn and early spring, turning lush green and spreading hard in midsummer heat while the grass around them thins. Tug the edge of a patch and a runner lifts up, rooting at every node; at the base of each leaf blade sits a fringe of fine hairs, which separates it from nimblewill.

Microstegium vimineum

A sprawling annual grass that looks like miniature bamboo — short, broad, pale-green lance-shaped leaves on thin wiry stems that root wherever a node touches soil, thriving in the shady damp edges where turf gives up. Tilt a leaf to the light for the giveaway: a silvery stripe of reflective hairs runs down the midrib, slightly off-centre. Crabgrass has nothing like it.

Lolium spp., Agrostis stolonifera, Stenotaphrum secundatum

A patch of grass that is clearly not your lawn: a coarse, glossy clump growing twice as fast as everything around it (ryegrass), a fine-bladed, puffy, light-green mat that browns out in circles in summer heat (creeping bentgrass), or wide, flat-bladed runners creeping in from a neighbor's yard or an old sod job (St. Augustine). The tell that separates these from ordinary grassy weeds is that all three are genuine turfgrass species — which is exactly why they are the hardest "weeds" to kill, since most selective herbicides are designed to spare grasses.

Cyperus spp.

Thin, upright stems that grow taller and faster than surrounding grass with a distinct yellowish-green color. Comes in yellow and purple varieties — both are treated the same way.

Kyllinga brevifolia

A low, dense, spreading carpet of shiny light-green grass-like blades on triangular stems, each topped by a single round green seedhead about the size of a pea sitting on top of three small leaves — unlike nutsedge, which pops up as scattered upright shoots rather than a solid mat.

Cyperus compressus

An upright clumpy tuft of glossy grass-like blades on a triangular stem, topped by an unusually large star-shaped head of flat, greenish spikelets with a toothed, comb-like outline — pull one up and you get plain fibrous roots with no nutlets, which is what separates it from nutsedge.

Vitis sp.

A climbing woody vine with big heart-shaped, coarsely toothed leaves and shredding, stringy bark on older stems, hoisting itself up fences and shrubs on forked tendrils that grow opposite the leaves; the dead giveaway is those coiling tendrils with no thorns anywhere on the stem — greenbrier climbs the same way but is armed with stiff prickles.

Parthenocissus quinquefolia

A woody vine with five toothed leaflets spreading from a single point like fingers, turning fire-engine red in early autumn, that grips brick and bark with tendrils tipped in tiny adhesive suction pads. Before you touch it, count and look: five leaflets and sticky tendril discs mean creeper, three leaflets and a fuzzy hairy stem mean poison ivy.

Lonicera sp.

An invasive multi-stemmed shrub with paired oval leaves, paired white-to-yellow (or pink) tubular flowers and paired shiny red berries, growing six to twenty feet in the back corner nobody weeds. Snap a pencil-thick twig for the definitive test: the invasive bush honeysuckles are hollow in the centre, while every native honeysuckle has solid white pith.

Acer negundo, Prunus sp., Gymnocladus dioicus, Elaeagnus sp., Forsythia sp.

Baby trees and shrubs sprouting where nobody mows — boxelder and maple, wild cherry and chokecherry, Kentucky coffeetree, autumn olive, forsythia — usually in a telltale line along a fence, under a wire, or against the foundation where a bird sat. The giveaway is the stem: stiff, round and already turning woody at the base, with true leaves that look like a miniature tree leaf rather than a weed.