Beautify Your Garden With Ornamental Grass

Beautify Your Garden With Ornamental Grass

Planting and growing ornamental grass in your yard and garden is a wonderful low maintenance way to add beauty with color, texture, and interesting focal points. Ornamental grass tends to grow quite high in many cases, so this adds an extra dimension of vertical interest in your yard and garden. And while some ornamental grasses can grow as tall as 20 feet, they don’t usually need to be trimmed or cut in the same way regular yard grass or bushes do.

Planting ornamental grass in bare spots of your yard can create a brand new look in the area. The grass can be used for naturalizing multiple areas of your yard, or it can be added to flower beds and gardens too. Some types of ornamental grass can be invasive though, and some might grow tall enough to block your flowers from receiving enough sunlight. So choose the ornamental grasses you plant in flower beds wisely.

Unlike regular grass, ornamental grass has little disease or pest concerns to worry about. And again, it doesn’t need to be trimmed. In fact, trimming ornamental grass too often will actually weaken it, and you can kill it by mowing or clipping too often.

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Garden Tip...

It is a mistake to crowd too many plants into a basket, if they grow they will soon become root-bound, stunted, and look sickly. If the hanging basket be of the ordinary size, one large and choice plant placed in the centre with a few graceful vines to droop over the edges, will have a better effect when established and growing, than if it were crowded with plants at the time of filling. Hanging baskets being constantly suspended, they are exposed to draughts of air from all sides, and the soil is soon dried out, hence careful watching is necessary in order to prevent the contents from becoming too dry. If the moss appears to be dry, take the basket down and dip it once or twice in a pail of water, this is better than sprinkling from a watering-pot. In filling hanging baskets, or vases of any kind, we invariably cover the surface of the soil with the same green moss used for lining, which, while it adds materially to the pleasing appearance of the whole, at the same time prevents the soil from drying out or becoming baked on the surface.
~ James Sheehan
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Like other types of plants and flowers, there are a wide variety of ornamental grasses which can be planted and grown too. Some will create just small clumps of color similar to the way a groundcover does, while others will create large focal points in your yard similar to the way trees and bushes do.

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Garden Tip...

There are many different species and varieties of Lilies, but none approach those known as Japan Lilies in the beauty and variety of their flowers, and their exquisite fragrance. They are perfectly hardy, and the fall is the proper time to plant them. If good strong bulbs are set out in the ground in October or November, planted about eight inches deep, they will throw up strong shoots the following summer, and bloom freely. The flowers increase in size and beauty with the age of the bulb, and this should be left to grow undisturbed in the same spot for five or six years; afterwards, if desired, the bulbs can be dug up, the offshoots removed, and the old bulbs reset, and they will do better than ever. Any of the young bulbs that have been removed can be planted out in the ground, and in a few years will form good blooming bulbs. The time to perform this work is in the fall.
~ James Sheehan
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Some ornamental grasses produce wonderful colors to accent your yard with too. The ornamental grass commonly known as Rubra usually displays a deep, dark red color mixed with a very deep green color that can be quite striking. Red switch grass is another favorite for the fall colors it produces.

Aside from producing wonderful colors and textures in your yard, many ornamental grasses also produce unusual and beautiful seed pods too. These can be left on the plants to further enhance their beauty if you’d like, plus they’ll draw more birds to your yard too. Some can even be picked and dried for use in decorating the inside of your home too.

Also like most flowers and decorative plants, some ornamental grasses will produce flowers too. And some will grow best in shade, while others prefer sun.

Choosing which ornamental grasses to plant in your yard and gardens might be the most difficult part of the process, but you’ll find that some grow as annuals so it’s easy to experiment with those first if you’re not familiar with growing them.

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