Design with ornamental grasses

Every A-list celebrity plant in your garden needs to be surrounded by co-stars and even ‘extras’ to really shine. This is where ornamental grasses step up as the visual companion plant par excellence. Here are three compelling reasons to include ornamental grasses in your landscape design.

Texture

This group of plants uniquely expands the breadth of foliage textures in your potential plant palette. They’re nearly always the finest foliages in any landscape – often by far. And when it comes to textural diversity, more is more. There’s never a case in which limiting the range of foliage textures is beneficial. Of course, at times, you may want to limit the colour range of flowers, or the colour range of leaves. You may also have a situation in which you want to limit the height range of the plants, or their provenance. But foliage texture always needs to be maximised, and to choose to eliminate grasses altogether would drastically reduce the textural spectrum.

Movement

The structure and formation of grasses – with their narrow or flat blades radiating out from a single point, and often arching gracefully in the process – make them susceptible to any passing zephyr. Some shimmer in response, some lean like windsocks, and others bounce about as if the leaf blades and flower stems were spring-loaded. In a truly stiff breeze, this can border on being alarming, but mostly the result is a playful animation of the kind offered by passing butterflies and birds.

Pattern

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. Think, for instance, of wildflowers in a grassy meadow. 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 spangling 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.

For a few varieties of ornamental grasses, read this article.

Photo by Michael McCoy