Dollarweed Control in Arlington TX Lawns: Causes and Treatments

If you’ve spotted bright green, perfectly round leaves that look like tiny lily pads pushing up through your Arlington lawn, you’ve got dollarweed — and it’s telling you something important about your yard. Dollarweed (Hydrocotyle spp.), also called pennywort, is a perennial broadleaf weed that loves wet feet. It doesn’t just show up randomly. It shows up where moisture collects, drains poorly, or irrigators run too long. Getting rid of it for good means understanding why it’s there in the first place.

How to Identify Dollarweed

Dollarweed is one of the easier weeds to identify once you know what to look for. The leaves are round — roughly the size of a silver dollar, which is where the name comes from — and bright, almost waxy green. The stem attaches to the center of the leaf like an umbrella handle, giving the plant a distinctive appearance that sets it apart from any common turfgrass or typical broadleaf weed. The leaves have scalloped edges and a slightly glossy surface. In moist conditions, dollarweed spreads in low, creeping mats that hug the soil. You’ll often find it in clusters near sprinkler heads, along fence lines where water drains, in low spots after rain, or anywhere the ground tends to stay wet longer than surrounding areas.

Why Dollarweed Is a Symptom, Not Just a Weed

Here’s the thing about dollarweed: it’s aquatic by nature. Its closest relatives grow in ponds and along creek banks. When it shows up in a lawn, it’s a reliable signal that the soil in that zone is staying too wet for too long. Overwatered yards, poor drainage, clay-pan areas that hold water after rain, low spots that collect runoff, and zones near sprinkler heads that receive overlapping spray are all prime dollarweed territory. Arlington’s heavy clay soils make this problem worse than it would be in sandier regions — clay holds water long after rain stops and doesn’t allow quick infiltration. Treating dollarweed without addressing the moisture conditions that invited it is like mopping up a spill without turning off the faucet.

Arlington’s Clay Soil Problem

Arlington and much of Tarrant County sit on heavy clay soils that expand when wet and crack when dry. These soils drain slowly, compact easily, and create the chronically moist conditions that dollarweed exploits. Lawns in newer subdivisions — where heavy construction equipment compacted the soil during building and only a thin layer of topsoil was placed over it — are especially prone to poor drainage and, by extension, dollarweed pressure. Irrigation systems that were calibrated for a different soil type or season often contribute as well. If your dollarweed keeps coming back in the same spots year after year, those locations almost certainly have a drainage or irrigation issue underneath the weed problem.

How Dollarweed Spreads

Dollarweed is a perennial, which means it doesn’t just die off at the end of the season and wait for seeds to regerminate. It survives winter through underground rhizomes and tubers, re-emerging aggressively as soon as temperatures warm in spring. Spread happens three ways:

• Rhizomes — underground stems that creep horizontally and send up new shoots at each node, allowing a single plant to colonize a large area quickly
• Tubers — small storage organs that survive dormancy and resprout even after the visible plant is killed
• Seed — small white flowers produce seeds that spread through water movement, foot traffic, and mowing equipment

Because dollarweed spreads vegetatively through rhizomes and tubers, hand-pulling is largely ineffective — you remove the top growth but leave the underground network intact and ready to regrow.

Step One: Fix the Moisture Source

Before any herbicide will deliver lasting results, the cultural conditions driving dollarweed need to be addressed. If your irrigation system is running too frequently or for too long, pull back run times and water deeply but infrequently instead. Bermuda grass and most warm-season turf in Arlington only need about one inch of water per week during the growing season. If low spots in the yard are pooling after rain, grading or improving drainage in those areas will reduce dollarweed habitat. Core aeration helps break up compacted clay and improves infiltration, making the soil less hospitable to moisture-loving weeds. These steps won’t eliminate existing dollarweed on their own, but they change the conditions so that herbicide treatments can actually stick.

Herbicide Control: What Works and Why It Takes Time

Dollarweed is a broadleaf weed, which means it does respond to broadleaf herbicides — unlike nutsedge, which requires entirely different chemistry. Products containing atrazine, triclopyr, 2,4-D, or combinations of these active ingredients can be effective against dollarweed when applied correctly. Atrazine is particularly effective in St. Augustine lawns and is one of the more reliable options in Texas conditions. However, there are several reasons why a single application rarely solves the problem:

• Dollarweed’s waxy leaf surface resists herbicide uptake without the right surfactant added to the mix
• Underground rhizomes and tubers survive initial surface applications and push up new growth within weeks
• If the moisture conditions are still favorable, new seeds from surrounding areas will re-establish the population quickly
• Timing matters — treatments are most effective on actively growing plants, not drought-stressed or dormant ones

Most professional programs plan for multiple applications across the season, spaced four to six weeks apart, to catch regrowth from surviving rhizomes and new seedlings. Patience and persistence are part of the process.

Why DIY Results Fade Fast

Off-the-shelf dollarweed sprays from hardware stores often deliver initial results that look encouraging — the visible top growth browns out, and the lawn looks clean. Then, three to four weeks later, the same patches come back. This happens for a few reasons. Consumer products frequently don’t include the adjuvants needed to penetrate dollarweed’s waxy leaf surface effectively. Application rates matter significantly, and under-dosing is common. And without a follow-up treatment on schedule, surviving underground structures simply resprout and the cycle continues. The moisture conditions that created the problem also haven’t changed, so the environment keeps welcoming new dollarweed growth.

The Professional Approach

A professional weed control program addresses dollarweed from both sides — the chemical and the cultural. Our weed control and fertilizer services include identifying the moisture and drainage patterns that are creating dollarweed pressure, applying the correct herbicide chemistry with proper surfactants and rates, and following up on schedule to address regrowth before it re-establishes. We also track which zones in the lawn are producing recurring weed pressure, which points toward the irrigation or drainage adjustments that will reduce future infestation. That whole-lawn perspective is what separates a treatment that lasts from one that just kicks the problem down the road by a few weeks.

If you’re dealing with clover in addition to dollarweed — another common broadleaf invader in DFW yards — our post on White Clover in DFW Lawns: Why It Spreads and How to Stop It covers why clover keeps coming back and how professional programs address it for good.