Ornamental Grasses in Garden Design
Landscaping Ideas - Ornamental Grasses
Among the big pluses of ornamental grasses in the home garden is that they bend rather than break, which is certainly an important consideration in windy environments--such as along a coastline or in the Great Plain states. And if your garden is geared as much to attracting songbirds as it is to color and fragrance, grasses play an important role in providing diversity of texture.
Ornamental grasses do well as a backdrop to the brightly colored blooms--such as red Columbine, butterfly bush, and hollyhocks, for example--that attract hummingbirds and others. Arranged with hosta in a shady rock garden, they serve admirably as points of interest, and as hedges and screens. Lower species such as yellow sedge do well as groundcover, as does ribbon grass, sometimes in poor soil, or in places where even Japanese yew refuses to grow.
Maiden grass, which clumps and grows to about five feet in ideal conditions, does well in a number of circumstances. A warm season grass, it does especially well around ponds or swimming pools. For fall color, Korean feather reed grass (also known as achy heart grass) is a medium clump-growth plant with refined pink plumes that gives way to bronze. Golden oats (Stipa gigantea), which grows in full sun and can reach eight feet, adds a lovely shimmer and softness to a fence line with its bristly spikes that turn gold when ripe in high summer.
Among the big pluses of ornamental grasses in the home garden is that they bend rather than break, which is certainly an important consideration in windy environments--such as along a coastline or in the Great Plain states. And if your garden is geared as much to attracting songbirds as it is to color and fragrance, grasses play an important role in providing diversity of texture.
Ornamental grasses do well as a backdrop to the brightly colored blooms--such as red Columbine, butterfly bush, and hollyhocks, for example--that attract hummingbirds and others. Arranged with hosta in a shady rock garden, they serve admirably as points of interest, and as hedges and screens. Lower species such as yellow sedge do well as groundcover, as does ribbon grass, sometimes in poor soil, or in places where even Japanese yew refuses to grow.
Maiden grass, which clumps and grows to about five feet in ideal conditions, does well in a number of circumstances. A warm season grass, it does especially well around ponds or swimming pools. For fall color, Korean feather reed grass (also known as achy heart grass) is a medium clump-growth plant with refined pink plumes that gives way to bronze. Golden oats (Stipa gigantea), which grows in full sun and can reach eight feet, adds a lovely shimmer and softness to a fence line with its bristly spikes that turn gold when ripe in high summer.
posted by blogger at
Monday, May 16, 2005
