I forgot to mention. It can get a foot high, but can be mowed.

I agree with annie........location and climate have a great deal to do with how well plants establish and spread or display weedy/invasive tendencies. What may be a very well-behaved garden plant in Mindy's MA may be a rampant thug in the OP's much milder VA location. Actually, the PNW doesn't necessarily have more "noxious weeds" than other locations.......because this is primarily an agricultural state, we just tend to be very proactive in identifying those that are or could become problematic :-) Many plants that ARE considered invasive on the east coast are NOT here - like burning bush, Japanese barberries, nandina, etc. And we don't get all that much snow.......I'd venture to say no more than NJ, perhaps quite a bit less!

Can't say I disagree with any of that. And if, by being in perhaps a bit too much of a hurry to explain myself, I gave the impression that any non-native plant is therefore a weed, well, I also didn't mean that! In my conception, weeds are annual, biennial or perennial plants which are here in N. America solely due to man's influence-primarily agriculture-and which depend upon the constant disturbance that is human civilization for their success. In this conception, a dandelion is a weed. Try to picture the fate of that species if today-right now-all human activity ceased: Sure, there'd be dandelions all over creation, and probably for years to come. But in time, the increasing height of whatever vegetation was left to take over would shade out the surface and make life impossible for dandelions. Maybe not the best example since seeds would still be around for quite some time, and whenever wind or fire cleared an area, dandelions could recolonize that spot. But even seeds don't last forever. In the complete absence of human activity, in time, dandelions would die out. Now I will readily admit, the existence today of so many non-native, exotic invasives all over the place will tend to distort this neat package. I don't believe common buckthorn, for one example, will ever be totally gone from the continent. It's just way too shade-tolerant. So there's that, and I do certainly consider common buckthorn to be a weed, as well as a scourge and a few other choice words I could sprinkle in here! Meanwhile, the 6 or 8 thousand Norway spruce I've planted up on my land in N. Wisconsin, along with other tree types....I do not consider weeds. So, somebody sure could poke holes in my definition. But again, in my conception-and it's not just "mine"-weeds are associated with agriculture...not having had any other mans of getting here, let alone becoming so successful. One of the things I do for my job is work with our city's stormwater engineers, helping to manage our large number of sites. Before I got onboard with this group, they had been led down the "native vegetation" pathway, which at least in the upper midwest always means only one thing-prairies! So even though this part of Wisconsin was heavily forested prior to European civilization getting here, quite a number of practitioners can't think of any plant community type when the words native vegetation are uttered. So a huge part of my goal has been to expand this concept. We plant pockets of things like tamarack and N. white cedar trees, we install red-osier dogwood shrubs-all things that are, in my conception, far more "native" than the prairie plant community which after all, is really more a southern or central plains thing. There were pockets of prairie up here, not so much where I'm at, but to our south and west, but these were ALL here because of the practice of Indians setting the land ablaze. So, what's really "natural"? I better quit. Obviously, I could write about this stuff all day! But I was going to say, to many of the folks viewing one of our prairie plantings (not prairie "restorations", please), all they see are weeds. They are not correct, just because they don't understand what they're looking at. +oM

Google "asparagus fern".