Specialty Gardening: Looking for a good drought resistant florida ground cover, 0 by JPlunket

JPlunket wrote:
Consider arachis pinto as an initial phase --it's in the peanut family, salt and drought tolerant, shallow-rooted, slows erosion, aerates and fixes N in the soil for any subsequent planting phases. See science here http://www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/isco/isco13/PAPERS R-Z/YIBIN.pd...

It's worked well for me. Plant during a rainy period, or irrigate initially to get it going and you'll quickly have a lush green "clover-like" low, deep-green ground cover with small, bright-yellow flowers in abundance. Photo attached was only a couple months after initial planting on 9" diagonal centers --it's now much thicker, totally shading out weeds, and providing unlimited sprigs for use in other areas.

If you then want to change over to vitiver or some other plant permanently, you can kill arachis off easily with weed-b-gon or similar (perish the thought in my case, but I hear it's easy)), and start from scratch, having improved your soil a lot. Or, you can in-plant larger plants selectively --over-seeding won't work without killing off the arachis first, because of shading effect.

Note that this plant is drought tolerant in the sense that it will SURVIVE an extended drought, bouncing back literally within an hour of rain or watering. It is not unaffected by drought, though --its leaves and flowers fold back in a dry spell to expose its mesh of runners, but it does seem to come right back.