Yours in Green

Yours in Green is a garden blog for not-so-green thumbs and keen gardeners alike. It's written in layman’s terms with a dash of humour thrown in.

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Posts with Tag: grasses

05 May 2011 ,12:46 Eye-catching grasses

By Jody Rigby

Grasses are undoubtedly the most commonly purchased group of plants, being the backbone of many a garden design. Although extremely high maintenance, turf is the easy alternative to paving an area – it’s somewhere soft for the kids to play or can be used as an eye-catching river of green to meander its way through garden beds, creating an inviting pathway.

For me however, I find the real showstoppers in the broad grouping of grasses to be the ornamental ones, tussock forming or clumping grasses that were never intended to be walked on but rather appreciated for their bold forms, colours and rich textures in the garden beds themselves.

They create bold upright lines in contemporary minimalist gardens, they scream movement and colour in the classic herbaceous border setting, and soften the edges of water features just to name a few uses.

Relatively low in maintenance, most simply need you to remove dead growth annually and to divide them if the clump is getting too large. Grasses are also great value (most can form new plants via division) and there are grasses for boggy areas through to neglected sun-drenched situations, all with special characteristics of their own.

Some eye-catching grasses to look out for are Japanese Blood grass Imperata cylindrical, Leather leaf Sedge Carex buchananii, Dwarf Blue Kangaroo Grass Themeda australis cv Mingo, and some new forms of Swamp foxtail Pennisetum alopecuroides - ‘ Black Lea’ with black seed heads; ‘Purple Lea’ - drought tolerant with a true purple seed head; and the cultivar Nafray - a semi dwarf with cream/purple seed heads.

These grasses should be available at any good nursery. (L-R) Bull-Rush Juncus sp., Great Pond Sedge Carex riparia, Black Mondo Grass Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘ Nigrescens’, Zebra Grass Miscanthus sinensis ‘ Zebrinus’, Knobby Club-Rush Isolepis nodosa, Narrow Leaf Maiden Grass Miscanthus sinensis ‘ Sarabande’, Frosted Curls Carex Carex albula, Blue Fescue Festuca glauca, Variegated Maiden Grass Miscanthus sinensis ‘Variegatus’, and Moor Grass/Blue Mountain Grass Sesleria caerulea.

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Jody Rigby
Jody Rigby is a well-known horticulturist and TV presenter.

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A constant learning curve, gardening is all about trial and error. Knowledge grows from sharing information between friends, passing down through generations, or just getting it wrong a few times before you get it right. It's about getting grubby outside and aching from digging too much, but then feeling that fall away when you get your first flower or prize fruit off a new tree... and getting so excited you need to tell everyone.

Yours in Green is everything I’ve learnt so far - what to do when, how to do it right the first time, and of course, some frustrations along the way and how to remedy them.

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