Hi I’m Dave Epstein. This is Growing Wisdom. We’re standing in a landscape and what a beautiful landscape with the waterfall, lot of perennials, some small trees, some shrubs, and of course, grasses. And that’s what I want to talk about today, how wonderful grasses are in the landscape. They really add movement. They add a sense of whimsy.
We’re standing in front of the Callem Magrastas Avalanche. This nice little flower plums here. These are the seed heads. This is what’s putting the seeds for next year. The leaf on this is a variegated white and green. It’s really nice and the plums on this guy come out in late June or early July, one of the first ones to actually, what we call, bloom. And look at how when the wind blows, the movement’s just fantastic. It adds movement to the landscape. And that’s what’s so wonderful about the grasses.
Let me show you another grass. It’s called a panicum, very different than the Callem Magrastas that we just looked at. The seed heads are much airier. There’s really space in between them. It gives a very different look to the landscape when this is blowing in the wind as suppose to the other grass we just looked at.
I love this Elijah blue fescue grass. Look how small it is and the wonderful blue color and you can see the seed heads which also come up fairly early are still there. Because it’s so small, it responds differently to the wind. But again, it’s a nice grass, great for the front of the border as suppose to some of the taller grasses we looked at in the back of the boarder.
One of the larger groups of grasses are the miscanthus This is Veragata, just a beautiful, big, huge clump, nice wide leaves. It hasn’t even flowered yet, late flowering. Better put this where you got plenty of room. Let’s take a look at a couple of others.
Look at this porcupine grass. You can see that it’s got that great variegated texture to it. Almost does look a little bit like a porcupine. Now, we’ve got morning light over here, nice big clump, has that really eerie descent color to the leaves. Look at that blowing in the wind. And then over my shoulder, here on sunrise, which has the great tassels that have this nice grayish white color. Compare that with this other miscanthus where the tassels are more of a golden color. You can certainly see there are plenty of grasses out there, one last grass, penicillium. This is a fountain grass. This is a dwarf fountain grass called Hamelin. Look at the flower heads, almost like a little tail of a fox. I love this one. It’s kind of neat, great for the garden, a little smaller too.
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