Property News · July 19, 2024

From low-growers to bright fountains, ornamental grasses have your garden covered


With more grasses to choose from every year, new and unusual varieties are the key to transforming sparse flower bedsMy first foray into ornamental grasses was a disaster: I made the wrong choices, put them in the wrong places, and snipped them back at the wrong time. The result, aside from the splodgy mess, was a confidence knock. But I have since developed a great affection for them, not least in creating my own garden, where slender clumps of Molinia caerulea, and the gentle sprays of Chasmanthium latifolium seed heads, have proved the most enchanting of late-season perennials. Pennisetum ‘Black Beauty’, with its broad abundance of dusky flower spikes, is hands-down the best plant I’ve grown in years.The popularity and range of ornamental grasses available has never been greater. The stately pampas grass (Cortaderia selloana) used to be one of the very few representatives (and according to urban myth, one in the front garden was a not-so secret symbol that the residents were swingers). But then followed the “new perennial movement” of the 1990s and early 2000s, whose generous tussocky drifts lifted grasses into the mainstream. Now, thanks to the naturalistic aesthetic in gardens, there are grasses for all arenas and in every conceivable form, from low-growers such as fescue and melick to the shimmering fountains of deschampsia, panicum and calamagrostis, whose cultivars seem to double in number each year. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…From low-growers to bright fountains, ornamental grasses have your garden covered

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