Hi, I'm Steven Orr.
Today we're going to be talking about ornamental grasses.
This really wonderful group of plants add a lot of structure to any garden but they
also add grace and movement, which is sometimes hard to find in perennials.
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I love ornamental grasses.
As you can see, we have a little breeze here in Des Moines today and they move.
That's what makes them so great in your garden.
A lot of other plants are kind of stationary, like an evergreen or some of the shrubs that
you have might be a little stiff.
Ornamental grasses have a natural grace to them so gardeners over the past couple of
decades have really taken to them.
A few things to know about them: they're so easy.
You really can't go wrong with an ornamental grass.
They don't require much care at all.
Once they're established they're low water.
They don't need a lot of fertilizer.
They have one thing they require which is you just need to cut them back once a year.
Some people leave them up over the winter.
I like to because once these dry they're really beautiful in the winter landscape.
Once they start to get kind of ratty, if they get covered with snow, you can chop them down.
But you definitely want to chop them down right above the root line a couple of inches.
You should do that in the spring for sure just to get rid of all of this dead growth
from the year before.
Kind of in mid to late spring you'll start to see all the green coming up through the
previous canes.
And you'll have this wonderful green new growth coming up, which is what you're going to have
for the rest of the year.
Another reason people grow these grassess is they actually do flower.
These are their seed heads or their blooms.
And this beautiful fountain grass is known for its fuzzy seed heads.
Another one is zebra grass, which is grown more for its leaves and its flowers in some
places because you have these beautiful yellow and green strips on the leaves, and that's
how it gets its name.
This is a tall grass, this gets to seven feet.
This switch grass also gets to about six feet.
It has beautiful, very airy little seed heads and moves very easily in the breeze.
Medium sized grasses, like these fountain grasses, are good for the front of the flower
bed or the middle part of the flower bed.
And then if you want something up at the very front or more of a ground cover, you can go
with beautiful sedges like this orange sedge or some of these other moor grasses.
They're great to mix in with other ground covers.
Some of them are better in the shade, can handle a little shade.
And then other ones are great to be mixed in with shrubs or mixed in with other perennials,
especially if you want to go for more of a meadow look.
You can mix them in with coneflowers or black-eyed Susans.
You get kind of a native, prairie garden feel to your garden.
As well as thinking about the height of the different plants, you should also think about
whether they're clumpers or spreaders or runners.
The clumpers are obviously more well behaved and they just need to be divided and they'll
kind of stay put, unless they're seeding themselves around, which is something to watch out for
on some of the species.
If you plant a runner, make sure you plant it in a place that it really can run, and
you're not going to have trouble weeding it out of everything all the time.
It really could be a place that it's used as a ground cover.
These taller ones, the taller species like this zebra grass, those are great also as
a shield or a living fence.
They'll only be shielding them in the summer time in the growing season.
But they're great to shield an air conditioning unit or some part of the yard that you don't
want to show all the time.
It will be summer only, though.
Like most perennials you can plant these in the spring but you can also plant them in
the fall.
I would avoid planting them in the middle of the summer when it's really hot.
One of the great things about grasses as well, kind of like hostas, is once you have a successful
clump of these you can divide them.
You'll know you really need to divide them if you see that the middle on some of the
species is starting to die out so you have kind of a hollow, dry middle and then fresh
grass around the edge.
That's definitely a time to divide them.
So dig the whole clump and then you would, with either a spade or you could use a gardening
saw with a jagged edge, you could just hack them into pieces.
You could hack them into three pieces, two pieces, if it's a really large clump maybe
even four pieces and then you can reposition that around your yard or give it to a friend.
Check with where you live, some of the grasses are native grasses and those are great to
have in your garden.
You don't have to worry about them spreading.
Others might be from Asia.
This miscanthus can spread in some parts of the country so you'll want to keep your eye
on that and also check with your local cooperative extension agent to see if this is a plant
that's bad to have in your area.
Because of the seed heads, it can leave your garden and get into a local marsh and cause
some trouble.
So if you're not growing this great group of plants, really give them a look because
they do add such a feeling of movement and grace to any garden.