I found this outside and tipped over, looking abandoned, unloved, and very unhappy, so I took it home. Does anyone know what it is? The leaves almost look like pine needles.
If this picture isn’t clear enough, let me know, and I’ll try to take a better one.
Looks like an asaparagus fern.
It is.
Thanks, guys.
If you live in a location that doesn’t freeze, you’ll want to be careful about where you have the plant. It produces little red seed balls that roll on to the ground that sprout and start growing all over your yard. The plants have small, very sharp burrs that hurt your fingers if you try to pull them out of the ground.
Here in southern CA, they are a disaster.
There probably was a good reason why it was trashed.
In Massachusetts, it’s a houseplant.
The one thing you’ll need to keep an eye on is that it gets enough moisture – when too dry, they get brittle and lose leaves like crazy. (Which reminds me, I need to put water in my radiator humidifiers.) If you have some kind of humidifying thing happening in your house, you’re probably okay, otherwise think about watering it by putting it in the shower, running water on it, and leaving it in there for a half an hour or so. Tip the pot to make sure it’s not gonna drip before you hang it back up.
The common name is a bit misleading. It is an asparagus, Asparagus densiflorus. The flowers are small, light pink and usually hidden by the foliage. The “seed balls” are berries, they are the fruits, not “seed balls”. Also, these plants will form small tubers which look like peeled grapes. They always reminded me of the nodules within the android in the movie ‘Alien’ when they hacked him apart after he went beserk.
Asparagus are monocots, they’re related to the lilies. These plants come from South Africa, which explains why they become an invasive weed in Southern California and Florida.
Many of them have really nasty spines. This one is different in that its spines are rather small, but are still not nice at all to put your hand within (they scratch and grab).
The Asparagus all tend to be rather open airy shrublike plants or vines. Even A. officinalis (edible Asparagus) will turn into a tall, airy shrub if the spears are allowed to develop. One of the finer ones is Asparagus plumosus which looks a lot like a fern with fine leaflets, and this one is a vine (it is a pest in Hawaii)
Asparagus all have phylloclades, which are flattened stems which function like leaves (true leaves, if any are small, and scale like)
Our neighbor had one of these for the longest time, but it never really went anywhere (probably because the bed it was planted never got much water, except in the rainy season).
