Rob's plants
home garden plants wildlife seed photos
plant sale journal topics plantlinks fun guestbook

Cymbopogon citratus

 
Cymbopogon citratus
Growing pond-side in our Houston garden
lemon grass

Common name lemon grass
Family poaceae
Life cycle tender perennial (Z10-11)
Size 24"
Light sun-light shade

Marvellous herb/spice used in southeast Asian cooking - an essential ingredient in my Indonesian peanut sauce! We've grown our own a few times over the past decade; in Pennsylvania I found it hardto overwinter, so I've given up on trying, but it's easy to start from store-bought stalks: just stick them in some soil, keep it moist and reasonably warm, and within a week or two you'll have a rooted plant. Not all of them take, but we've been successful more than half the time. The plant in the photo at right here was recently rooted - you can see the fresh growth pushing up above the original greenery.
Now that we're in Texas, our plants are sufficiently hardy to survive even the coldest winters, when they regrow from the roots (in milder winters, the top growth survives as well). It's nice to be able to walk outside just about any time of year and grab a few stems.

In our garden, this plant grows in the following areas: waterfall pondside, foundation border

About my plant portraits
PlantLinks to other web pages about Cymbopogon citratus


I welcome comments about my web pages; feel free to use the form below to leave feedback about this particular page. For the benefit of other visitors to these pages, I will list any relevant comments you leave, and if appropriate, I will update my page to correct mis-information. Faced with an ever-increasing onslaught of spam, I'm forced to discard any comments including html markups. Please submit your comment as plain text. If you have a comment about the website as a whole, please leave it in my guestbook. If you have a question that needs a personal response, please e-mail me.

Your name

Your comments