Plant in full sun to light shade and irrigate occasionally to regularly. We have never seen cold damage on this plant, and it is likely hardy to below 15° F. In our garden we have trained this plant up on a 10-foot-tall metal pipe which it has grown well above and reached 15 feet wide – to keep it in bounds we power shear it back a bit every two years or so and it rebounds rapidly.

Ephedra tweediana is native to mid-elevation seasonally dry forests of southern Brazil, northeast Argentina and Uruguay. Ephedra are ancient gymnosperms in the division Gnetophyta that also includes Welwitschia. Early Ephedra are found in fossil records dating back to the Early Cretaceous (around 125 million years ago) and are particularly botanically interesting because of their unique cone evolution that evolved from loose stem shoot that transitioned into small cones. On common name for the group is Jointfir. The name for the genus is ancient and thought to be a name used for a species by the Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder and originated from the Greek words 'epi', meaning "on" and 'hedra' meaning "seat" meaning a "horsetail" because of the plants jointed and leafless stems. The specific epithet honors the Scottish gardener and explorer John Tweedie (1775–1862) who spent decades exploring and cataloging the flora of South America. One common name for this plant in its natural habitat is Pico de Loro, meaning "parrot's beak".

In the Mildred Mathias Botanic Garden, on the campus of the University of California Los Angeles, this plant is grown without support, and they note it to have a haystack-like form to 12 feet tall and wide. In Annie's Annuals catalog it is described as looking like "Cousin It" and it is noted that it will grow to 3 to 5 feet tall by 5 feet wide. It seems to have taken this form along the slopes of Putah Creek in the UC Davis Arboretum where a group has been planted as a large-scale shrubby groundcover. However it is grown, this plant is sure to attract attention as it does when visitors see our large and towering specimen. Our thanks to Dylan Hannon, now the curator of the Huntington Garden Conservatory, who gave us this strange yet interestingly attractive plant in 1997 and we grew it until closing our nursery in 2025. Dylan got his original cutting of this plant from the Mildred Mathias Botanic Garden. 

The information displayed on this page about Ephedra tweediana is based on our research conducted about this plant from books in our nursery library as well as from information that is provided by reliable online resources. We also have included our own observations made about it as it grew in the nursery gardens and other gardens visited, as well how the crops of this plant performed in the containers when we had them in our nursery field. We also include comments received from others and welcome hearing from anyone who has information about this plant, particularly if it includes cultural information aiding others to better grow it.