Ornamental grasses – planting and care
The appearance of ornamental grasses allows them to fit well in a variety of landscaping with different garden styles. There are many garden “ideas” with herbs and grasses.
The most popular of these is a decorative vegetable garden with herbs and grains.
Rules for composing compositions from ornamental grasses and grains
Will be original fashionable flower garden, but not from perennial flowers. To decorate such a garden will require many different crops of grasses, differing in the form of a curtain, height, shades of foliage and different inflorescences.
Planting ornamental crops and herbs in the garden should be the same as perennial flowers in the flower bed, using the basic laws of composition. The place for cereal crops should be sunny, open and well visible.
Decorative grasses and cereals are planted in clumps to each other, as a rule, they are not decorated with bright decorative elements, in such a “garden” fit well a few beautiful boulders or decorative dumps.
How to plant ornamental herbs and crops
To create your own garden, you need to stock up on seedlings of different types of grasses. Some of them can be purchased in nurseries, while rare ones can be grown from seeds. Ornamental crops in pots are first planted in the selected place for the garden to choose a good place, and then taken out of the pots and planted.
It is necessary to give importance to the size of the clumps in the mature state, as well as their height. It is advisable to make the spacing between plantings of ornamental grasses equal to the height of some grasses.
A garden with ornamental grasses and cereals can stand alone, then they should be perceived as a specific object and laid out according to the same rules as rock gardens or flower beds.
You can install a mini gazebo, pergola or arch. Next to it, place 1-2 large boulders and arrange an iridarium. And next to the pergola can be a grain garden, in which you can add a stone figure and put a beautiful hook.
It is recommended to use vertical landscaping for the pergola, for example, plant a lemongrass, rowan, spruce or hazel tree next to it. Ornamental grasses and herbs are also indispensable in the design of “dry” streams and water gardens.
Properties of ornamental grasses and grasses
Perennial grasses are unpretentious, but still have some features: not all of them are planted in a permanent place. “Seedlings” of some species of grasses need to get stronger in a small garden set aside for them. Seedlings planted in a permanent place will be oppressed by other plants during the germination stage. They can be immediately planted only in open places, where there are no other flowers nearby. But there are unpretentious herbs and annuals that are sown immediately with seeds in the open ground.
large and small
The shape and size of the bush of ornamental grasses varies greatly. Among them, there are compact, low-growing plants (fescue), which are well established in stony gardens, fill voids in mixborders or form light borders. These grasses combine well with heather.
Large crops are usually the centerpiece of a flower bed. Good partners for large crops are mulines, dahlias, and various plants with open foliage. Both low and high crops are combined with conifers and shrubs with spherical crowns, such as barberry. Some species of grasses are brightly ornamental, requiring a special environment.
For example, the dark foliage of the ‘Nigrescens’ variety is effective only against a light background, while the shoots of the ‘Spiralis’ variety are lost in the vicinity of flowering plants. Such cereals are best complemented by stones or herbaceous singoniums in flower pots.
Light Quarter Cereal Plants
The color range of ornamental grasses is also wide. In addition to shades of green, there are gray-blue or beige leaves. There are also yellow-leaved species and varieties – for example, the putrid boron variety ‘aureum’. Most ornamental grasses have different varieties. They look spectacular with ornamental decals. For example, yellow-headed Virta in combination with miscanthus variety ‘Zebrina’.
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Cereal garden – prairie on the plot with your own hands
Ornamental crops in the garden are a great addition to your landscape project. But unpretentious and spectacular cereal plants can become not only a “background” of the usual plants, but also a bright center of the composition, or even form an independent cereal garden!
The tradition of using cereal plants for decorative purposes has existed since very ancient times. Since then, the range of plants and their diversity has grown considerably. A theme garden entirely of cereal crops is one type of a new and fashionable modern trend in landscape design, namely the monoculture garden, in which the “main” arplant occupies at least 70-80% of the area.
What is good about the corn garden? First of all, a large number of possible options for creating your own unique composition. Today there are more than 300 ornamental crops of very different appearance, and almost all of them have their own color and size variations, and most are pleasing to the eye all year round. This is especially important in late fall and winter, when the vast majority of other plants, unfortunately, lose their ornamental value.
Ekaterina Zhukova, head of the Zlakov nursery, shares the secrets of creating a modern garden with low production.
Equally important, most cereals are quite resistant to the vagaries of the weather and unpretentious in care. In addition, muesli grasses are appropriate in any garden. Wet or dry area, shaded or sunny, lowland or hill – there are sure to be suitable for every occasion. Why not pay attention to these plants?
Choosing plants for a muesli garden
First of all, of course, you should decide what ornamental crops will grow in your garden. Do not rush to buy the first plant you see that you liked on a picture on the Internet or in a gardening magazine – no matter how unpretentious crops are, each of them has its own preferences, which must be respected.
However, these preferences are easy to predict if you ask about the country in which a particular crop grows. Take, for example, the pampas grass, which is native to South America. Obviously it will survive dry summers without problems, but in regions with frosty (and especially wet) winters it will have difficulty and look less ornamental.
So, an important aspect is the climate zone in which the grain garden is located. It can look good at any time of year with a well-chosen assortment of plants, but before you buy or plant any crop, make sure it can successfully grow and overwinter in your latitude.
For example, warm-season crops start growing at fairly low temperatures in early spring, when the garden is almost bare. As early as May, their growth slows down and there is a reason to prune the plants. They begin to grow vigorously again in early to mid-summer and bloom early in the fall season. These grains include miscanthus, stick millet, lightning, spartina comb, rye, and emperor.
In contrast, cool-season cereals are most effective in the first wave, precisely in early summer. They begin to grow in high humidity and temperatures of about 10-15 °C, and when it reaches about 25 °C,
growth stops. The second period of activity begins in the fall, and the panicles persist through the winter. Such grasses include fescue, broad-leaved grass, meadow ryegrass, meadow ryegrass, sedge, feather grass, fodder mite, mane barley and others.
Ornamental grasses can literally transform a garden in a few seasons. But not all of them can survive our winters.
Site moisture is not an empty issue either. There are hydrophytes that like moist, semi-shady places and are good at standing water in acidic soil. They are also excellent for natural landscaping of the banks and shallows of ornamental water bodies. These are fox sedge, grass aurus, virginia millet, narrow-leaved cattleya, large mannika, reedgrass, sagebrush, divergent reed, miscanthus, phalaris reed, and short-grass reed.
There are completely different kinds of grasses – which need open, sunny spots and light, well-drained soil. Sometimes they even survive excessively dry summers without sacrificing their ornamental quality. These are Cylindrical Imperata, Bearded Nianthus, Sporobolus aerialis, Sandy rust, Gray fescue, Reed creeper, Stumpy bentgrass, and Butelua gracefula.
There is also a third, intermediate group of mesophytic crops that prefer moderate soil moisture.
When choosing an assortment of plants for a grain garden, not only climatic and landscape features of the plot are taken into account, but also its size. Most crops grow powerful and fill the entire area. This is not critical if you want your grain garden to be free-growing and large. For small flower beds, this can be a real problem. If this is just your case, consider in advance how to contain the sprawl of certain crops. For example, you can use separate vases for them or limit their growth with wide border strips of any material buried in the ground.
There are so-called aggressive crops that grow especially actively, displacing their neighbors and occupying the entire area with their long rhizomes. Their use in general plantings should be carefully considered and limited. These include, for example, sandy elimus, variegated phalaris, sugarflowered rocket.
If you thoughtfully approach the formation of mixed cereal plantings, you will also take into account their size, since among the ornamental cereals you can find both twenty-centimeter dwarfs and almost two-meter giants.
The smallest grasses are usually commonly planted in the foreground of a flower bed or along the edges of an enclosed flower bed, framing garden paths and borders, making alpine slides and wakes. Such cultivars, which usually do not grow taller than 40 cm, include:
- Meadowsweet,
- fescue,
- cesleria,
- Razorback ovipositor,
- Bulkhead Dungeness,
- Lamarquia goldenis,
- Celeria sizai and others.
Medium-growing crops (up to 80-90 cm in height) look good in separate groups in the garden or in the middle ground of a tiered flower bed. These are:
- barley mane,
- HALOS – displaced spring.
- Imperata cylindrica,
- Mulenbergia hairy,
- Peristocetinum,
- Phalaris canarius, and others.
The tallest ornamental crops, growing more than 1 m, are used as a background in the background of the flower bed, in the center of closed plantings and even as a miniature fence or screen dividing the area of the plot. Some of these include:
- Miscanthus,
- Cortradia .
- Slag – river broadleaf,
- Perlik high, etc.
How to take care of cereals
The material would be incomplete without a short list of simple rules for caring for grain crops.
Prepare in advance the site for planting the selected crops – check the fertility, acidity, moisture and water permeability (as already mentioned, different crops have different requirements for these factors). If necessary, arrange drainage, remove sod, clean the area from the roots of weeds, add sand to the sandbox. Introduce a small amount of baked compost into the soil – do not overdo it, remember that high soil is not suitable for crops (reduces their winter-hardiness and resistance to disease).
The best time for planting, dividing bushes and sowing cereal seeds is spring, although this can also be done in the fall. Cereal seeds, which should be stored in a dry place, need to be wet stratified for several months before sowing.
If you want to become an expert at growing flowers and conifers from seed, do the stratification procedure.
Taking care of growing crops is no different from what is accepted for most plants – weeding, watering, loosening the soil. When planting grains, it’s a good idea to use pebbles of different sizes to keep moisture inhibiting the growth of weeds and reducing moisture.
If you have not trimmed plants since the fall, this can be done in the spring, so that old withered leaves do not interfere with the young shoots. Depending on the species and size of the crop, this can be done partially or completely under the root.
The leaves of many crops have very sharp edges – work with them carefully, do not forget gloves.
Usually young crops do not need fertilizing (especially in the first year of vegetation). But if you see that the plant, frankly, not enough nutrients, you can feed it with complex mineral fertilizers (1 handful of dry fertilizer per 1 square meter).
Diseases and pests practically do not damage the grain, so this part of the agrotechnics does not cause any difficulties.
In summer, it is necessary to make sure that the roots of grains do not dry out, timely moderate watering, and then reliably loosen the soil to avoid stagnant water and the formation of soil crust.
Some grains (depending on their winter hardiness, see above) should be protected for the cold season at least in the form of a branch or in a bridle in the shepherds. Others are outdoors in winter and even pleasing to the eye with their floral patches.
Combinations with cereal plants
Even if you don’t yet decide to create a monoculture muesli garden after reading all this, don’t forget that the ornamental muesli in your variety are great “neighbors” for many larger or lighter plants that share or complement each other. Think of mixed arrangements that can be easily arranged on the site.
Cereal plants are truly versatile. In this regard, they are unique in that with the right selection of specimens can fit into a garden composition of absolutely any style, in any rockery, mixboard, alpine hill and coastal area.
For example, a combination of cereals and trees will be successful. Try planting different, not very tall segments or a forest lawn under ornately trimmed trees. Or create a real wildlife corner next to the house – a “spy” in the neighboring forest, which combines the usual pines, thujas, firs, junipers or spruces. You’ll probably see wild heartwood, o lozera, lazy pine, mycatus, the light or dark greens of conifers set off beautifully. Why not replicate this on the site, choosing the same grasses or more spectacular cultivated relatives if you wish?
On a shady site, muesli (equally woodland or gray) – with fountains and ferns. In the open vacancy “calm” color melik, pike, reedgrass, sporobol, molinia, sesleria, beds in which flowering perennials (geraniums, aster, iris, echinacea, badanum, catnip, catnip, liatris) are planted in large light spots.
We hope that we have convinced you that ornamental grasses are an excellent choice due to their non-familiarity and a large selection of species to create beautiful compositions in almost any garden and climatic conditions. All you have to do is find “your” plants and combine them correctly on the site, which is what we wish for you.
