The Telegraph
How to keep ornamental grasses looking smart in winter, by gardening expert Helen Yemm
Each week, Telegraph gardening skilled Helen Yemm offers ideas and recommendation on all of your gardening issues whether or not at dwelling or on the allotment. When you’ve got a query, see under for how one can contact her. Gardeners of my acquaintance (and, expensive readers, that features a lot of you who inform me lots about your gardening habits), appear in the primary to not have gone mad for dramatic, wafty grasses. Nevertheless, we dabble, as usually as not beginning with strategically positioned dramatic singletons as “punctuation marks” in conventional borders. Now, as the brand new yr reveals, many such grasses are beginning to look a bit of weather-weary and it could be a great time to air just a few upkeep fundamentals. Botanists/gardeners have handily put decorative grasses into two teams, ruled, presumably, by their climatic origins. Cool season grasses This group consists of the favored stipas, deschampsias and festucas. They begin producing a refined quantity of recent development early within the yr to flower in excessive summer season, a lot of them remaining roughly evergreen. To take care of their seems and lengthen their lives give them a radical grooming session and trim in spring and maybe an additional spruce-up in late summer season if they begin trying ratty. This remedy fits them higher than a radical early-season annual in the reduction of (from which older crops on this group don’t get better simply). Use gloved palms or a small metallic shrub rake, palms or tines going through upwards, to comb by way of clumps, teasing out the earlier season’s beige stays. The very best time to raise, divide or change cool season grasses is shortly upon us: late winter or early spring. It’s price noting, at this level, that grasses don’t want wealthy soil or fertiliser, and that many develop effectively in containers. Some members of this group self-seed generously if allowed to take action – notoriously the peroxide blond Stipa tenuissima and auburn pheasant tail grass, aka Stipa arundinacea now renamed Anemanthele lessoniana – I do know, I do know, annoying. The upside to the self-seeding is a straightforward provide of youthful replacements for exhausted father or mother crops. Heat season grasses In contrast to the primary group, heat season grasses (e.g. arundo, cortaderia, imperata, miscanthus, panicum, pennisetum and phalaris) begin rising later and shouldn’t be divided or planted till late spring, when they’re in energetic development. Their nice annual cutting-down session (to some centimetres from the bottom) can happen as soon as these grasses now not make a satisfying autumn/winter “assertion”, however (importantly) effectively earlier than they begin to produce their new base development, which might simply get broken within the fray. So test earlier than you begin fastidiously reducing them in early to mid-spring. Tying clumps round their waists with twine earlier than shearing them off on the ankles (for which one-handed Jakoti shears are the right gadget) ensures far much less tidying up afterwards. Design ideas Lastly, the place do you begin with inserting grasses – deciding what can be good the place and with what, provided that it’s virtually inconceivable to purchase potted grass crops that give any clue as to their eventual stature, type, and attract? Summer season analysis on the hoof is important And I can suggest Designing with Grasses by Neil Lucas (Timber Press) of Knoll Gardens nursery in Dorset. Additionally, Nancy J Ondra’s e-book, Grasses – Versatile Companions for Unusual Backyard Design (Storey Books), regardless of being written by an American for North American gardeners, describes and illustrates some inspiring combos. Tip for bulbs in late winter
