How to use grasses in your garden.
With around 780 genera and around 12,000 species the Grasses collectively known as Poaceae are the fifth-largest plant family, with grasslands accounting for 40% of the land area of Earth.
Grasses have steadily become a key feature of garden design over the last decades. Originating in the Steppe or Prairie Planting Movement from the US, grasses have become a staple for garden designers. We just love the texture and wide variety of grasses available to us. Contemporary planting design has moved away from ‘borders’ of perfectly staged and presented plants, and more into mass plantings, often inspired by how plants are distributed in a natural or wild setting. Grasses are the perfect foil to these naturalist plantings. They offer excellent contrast to other perennials and shrubs and their structure makes them susceptible to the slightest breeze, creating movement. They can be the ’glue’ that holds the planting design together and allows other specimen plants to really shine.
Planting a sea of grasses is an effective, low-maintenance way of dealing with large areas, and can be a good alternative to turf. Some grasses will stabilise a slope, while other taller varieties can be used to block out unwanted views.
When using grasses consider the flow of the planting and allow for repetition of groups to give a natural and graceful effect. Grasses really come into their own when designing a naturalistic or native garden. Think, for instance, of wildflowers in a grassland. The same flower echoes around your field of view, with dense clumps here and there, linked by outlying individuals, such that your eye plays over the whole space, gaining pleasure as much from the repeating patterns as the individual beauty of the blooms. To capture this same magic in the garden requires plants that have a legibility in either flower or form, so that our eye can engage with them and register the repetition. Grasses are one of the few groups of plants that have a sufficiently distinct natural form, without regular clipping to provide a repeating focal point.
Next month I will talk about more about our native grasses and their role in garden design. In the meantime, happy gardening.
Visit Clark+Granger at www.cplusg.com.au or phone 0456111120 to find out more
