Purple Wood Sorrel, also known as Oxalis drummondii is a beautiful addition to any flower bed or garden spot that needs a perennial native plant to serve as groundcover.

It will grow in areas with full sun or partial shade. The individuals pictured here were grown in a front flower bed that was shaded by mature live oaks. These pictures were taken in April and these plants tended to bloom until fall. Some sources say they tend to bloom only in the fall but it has to do with how much light they get.

Purple Wood Sorrel are easy to grow, mine thrived on a rich sandy soil that was partially shaded and watered by rainfall primarily.

I loved the small pink flowers with the darker pink stripes and the leaves made me think I had shamrocks the first time I saw these. These tough, colorful plants thrived in that corner of the flower bed by my front door and provided years of greenery and beautiful flowers for not much work.

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I have seen these little yellow flowers appearing all over my lawn during March. I finally found time to photograph them! These flowers are about an inch in diameter, about half the length of a honey bee.

Oxalis dillenii are perennials which means they come back every year. I love their tiny, bright yellow flowers. The day was slightly overcast when I took these pictures. When the sun isn’t shining brightly enough, these little guys fold their leaves.

One of the characters that identifies this species is the way its flower stems bend at both ends to position its seed capsule so it can eject its seeds far from the parent plant when it explodes! Little missile launchers in the lawn! You can see a flower in the bottom foreground that has set seed and shows the double bend. The maturing seed pod at the center of the image is what the foreground flower will look like eventually.

When the sun goes down, O. dillenii rolls up its flowers, and folds its leaves. Amazing!

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