Steve Snedeker’s Landscaping and Gardening Blog

Grasses

I’m recycling this post and adding some pertinent pictures because of an amazing couple of weeks – maybe month – of people asking questions about grasses.

Every year it seems we read about yet another incredibly attractive grass species. We watch as these hybridized and developed new and altered species express all that the clump grasses – and even lawn grasses – do to make themselves so appealing. Hybridized lawn grasses are in a constant search for a turf grass which won’t require using so much water to stay green and very substantial progress has been and is being made. But they are for another time. This is the Landscape Grass realm.

Landscape Grasses

(click any image to enlarge)

Comfortable small clumps such as these gorgeous small grasses shown here at the Portland Chinese Garden influence a walk, softening the impact of transitional areas and making them every bit as important to attend as the larger plants and views beyond them. Our attention begins at where we walk and it is plain to see these borders are a welcoming type.

Other grasses are hugely different – and serve different effects. The grasses below frame a Junior High School sign. As they develop, they nearly overwhelm it with silky seed fronds  and the inherent yellow tints of the leaves themselves.

And, reaching larger dimensions, no grass discussion ever seems complete with mention of the Pampas Grasses we have all come to enjoy so much. Set here amid a rather stunning “All Grass” landscape design, complete with at least 3 different species comprising the entirety of this massed landscape planting, we see the effectiveness of form and structure as well as the simple beauty of the plants themselves.

Smaller grasses are equally effective when massed, as could be expected. Reliable, tough grasses survive and thrive in our landscapes requiring little outside of the odd yearly “haircut”. They are neither water or maintenance hogs, seemingly impervious to many of the diseases and problems in more delicate species. Full sun? No problem? Part sun?  Take us there. Not great soil? Yum! This is an easy plant to come to like!

Some are just plain pretty all on their own, too:

And they are even nicer in numbers -  in a grouping, changing the hard lines of cement planters and streets to a softer, less angular existence.

These landscape grasses can come in some startlingly understated form, small, wispy, wind-affected silk flags coming out of the ground around us. Put together they make a stunning mass of unique and surprising color.

This is my “Blond Bed”. 

Famous for their beautiful electric pink seed fronds, these “Muhley Grasses” at the entry to Yew Dell Gardens in Louisville, Kentucky, show another amazing possibility in the use of grass for color as well as form.

Easy-to-maintain, hardy and somewhat drought-tolerant, grasses of all kinds are making a monster inroad into the thinking of landscape designers. The newer varieties of these beauties are tending towards more color, more variegation, more amazing seed colors, silkier textures and just generally yet more applications within landscapes. Many of these grasses have been used even in the distant past, yet the newer stuff just keeps coming with wonderful new cultivars of impressive beauty and form.

I say keep it up.

Gleaned over the years……… and some very recent – as in last week.

A somewhat perfect Vertical Garden – from Portland, Oregon.

(click any image to enlarge)

The lasting virtue of this relatively new technology is in its space-saving reclamation of Nature over Cement – among other things. Of course, who doesn’t like the otherwise fascinating look at small works of art hung on a wall or hallway?

Roses called in – said “Get a load of us!”

The Portland, Oregon Rose Garden proves yet again why Portland calls itself “The Rose City” – not that I doubted its claim.

Such a gorgeous setting, overall……

This humongous Weeping Beech always captivated me. It just keeps growing, too, quite happily. The entire “weeping” element of trees has captivated me for some time -

I began using them shamelessly in my own designs after seeing them in such circumstances – and in such profusion as exists around Portland.

I even remember when the picture above was looking like this:

But, yes, the fascination with Weeping Trees stayed. There was always something “sympathetic” about the downward direction of limbs and the coursing water looking so “in place” beside it.

It became something of a trademark in my water feature constructions -

But weeping trees may also claim their very own environment and stand gorgeously on their own in a soft, appealing gesture.

Did someone say roses? Let’s get drunk on some.

On my most recent visit to the Portland Rose Garden, my wonderful friend Annette and her family accompanied me – or I them – Annette played with her filter on a few -

to interesting ends……….

Of course, some require No Filter – Nature does it for us……

For some supremely stupid reason, I often laugh when I see this picture:

My Current Quandary Is What To Like Most About Spring??

Which blooms rock most?…………..Is it the Rhododendrons?

The absurd profusions of the Spring-blooming Crabapples and Cherries?

Or did we miss something?

Dogwoods, for example?

Speaking of “absurd profusions”…………

This is an excellent method of exposing some archives………..Hope you enjoyed it!

So after we admire the incredible work of Patrick Blanc, we return to Earth and find a veritable buzz over the entire Verticality thingy.  We see what the PNC Bank in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania did and we do a bit of drooling. This, so far, is the single largest Vertical Wall construction in America and comes in at 2,380 square feet, a total of 14,440 plants, stuck up on the side of a building and offering something few other places have: the soft, lush organic features of plants, replete with seasonal changes:

So, First – The Massive Walls

(click any image to enlarge)

As the plantings mature, we pay attention:

While so much of the field is still experimental as it can be, the strides made by Patrick Blanc have offered immediate enthusiasm from disparate people and firms. Even the US federal Government is considering getting in on the act with the addition of a solid planted wall some 250 feet high in beautiful downtown Portland Oregon:

We realize many wonderful results from all these efforts, including impacts on air quality as well as a startling beauty – a blessedly impractical gorgeousness.

What is most interesting about any of these big constructions are the local effects. The intense plantings operate as a virtual “lung”, recycling and purifying the air aspired by the thousands of plants. From the EXPO 2005 Aichi website:

“At both ends of the central large screen, roses and other glamorous flowers are planted in pockets of the canvas made from kenaf and coated with photocatalyst. Other presentations of state-of-the-art greening technologies include sedum vegetation mats pasted over foam resin materials, vines planted over vegetation boards made of peat moss, and lovely wild flowers planted on bog moss.

Bio-lung is sprayed with mist of active water generated by ceramics. This spraying has the effect of cooling the temperature in the area. Bio-lung is designed to absorb carbon dioxide and supply oxygen with the vegetable power, in addition to the cooling effect in the summer months. It thus presents a model for future environmental equipment that will improve the urban environment and reduce environmental impact.”

I like the look, myself.

Before Proceeding: A Caveat

It may also be time for a caveat towards the entire enterprise, just to give a voice to the possibility of failure over time. It pays to go gently into this newer realm of horticulture owing to effects and implications which we are not entirely up-to-date with as yet. There have been some failures, once advertised as ‘no brainer’ success stories and triumphantly announced as the “next new wave”.

This can also happen:

A genuinely sad development, as are all gardening failures, this one the Paradise Park Children’s Centre in London designed and installed for a hefty bit of change and subsequently failed in development. The issue is broached in this article from Jetson Green’s magazine. An excerpt:

“It’s an interesting situation.  A lot of green technology is new and using it will certainly be an experiment.  Plus, here in the states, public money is chasing LEED and green building, so there will be some high profile blunders — kind of like this one.  But after reviewing all the commentary and various articles, there’s still no clear cut articulation of the what exactly happened.  Why did Paradise Park Children Centre’s living wall die?  Was it the design?  Construction?  Maintenance?  Or some combination of all three?”

The truth is, in landscaping, new technologies give us ways to deal with species’ which are millions of years old, lol. We try all sorts of stuff and sometimes we can’t help trying to fit square pegs into round holes. Some of the earlier efforts, for example, at “Xeriscaping” resulted in preposterous failures as the “drip technology” matured and we found more out about its nuances.

I’ve purloined a picture from a very favorite and quite prolific garden blogger, Alice @ Alice’s Garden Travel Buzz, who I have to insist we all visit regularly. She has also discovered vertical gardening and she has written as extensively as I have on Monsieur Blanc, including his latest effort in San Fransisco, featured in the link.

Here is Alice’s picture taken this year – another year into the floral development – at the Athenaeum Hotel:

Enlarging these photo’s reveals a riveting study in maturation, and in such a short period of time.

Pretty wild stuff.

Next post, we will deal with the “Next Phase” – what works and who is dealing with the future of vertical gardening. In many cases, it might just be fine enough to simply appreciate yet another design innovation made of simple materials, destined for temporary life, recyclable, ultimately re-designable as well. The primary virtue of it all is that we are indeed dealing with plants – what we do from there (outside of feeding and nurturing) is up to the artist in us all:

(this picture taken from a reprint of a photo from Scott  at Season’s Landscaping). I really like what they do, down in the L.A. Region.

On a smaller scale – nothing really new here, just pretty as heck, from the Portland, Oregon Vertical gardening experts at the neat Singer Hill Cafe, where I aim to drink a cup o’ Joe in mere days from now as I visit up there:

Using various grasses in landscapes is not particularly new. Dating back from a period when the UK’s interest piqued towards the new Pampas Grasses, imported from the more arid South American countries, grasses soon made their usefulness spread to the wider world. It’s certainly easy to see the attractiveness of Pampas Grass, and even more so when their sheer size and rather stately presence becomes bedecked in such gorgeous seed fronds as those show below.

(click any image to enlarge)

The truth is, grasses were especially greeted owing to how these large broom-like fronds manifested. Their dried effects have become highly desirable in indoor settings, often dyed but always soft and sturdy. There’s really nothing quite like them.

But the more intrepid gardeners and landscaping aficionado’s stayed hard at work, developing and hybridizing yet more oodles of newer grasses. The results are simply mind-blowing. It does seem that grasses are receiving more innovations than nearly any other garden/landscape species. Here is a bizarre plant, full of the most unusual potentials -note the color!

This is the Panicum Virgatum “Prairie Sky“.

I’m not sure we were entirely ready for blue blooms on grasses, although, to be honest, after seeing the wonderful Muhly Grass (Muhlenbergia Capillaris) which is being more widely used as accents in landscapes, one should probably not be the least bit surprised:

The blooms seem to be the thing, so far, and with ample reason……………and yet…………….

We find ourselves, as designers and plant lovers beset with a range of options which is nearly brand new – and offering entirely new effects to present to the wider cosmetical world.

The very shapes and forms of these gorgeous species make incredible “edge softeners”, appearing in a fuzzy tight globular form even prior to the emergence of their lovely fronds. As a pure shaped effect, the roundness and soft lines of these various grasses do not even take advantage of their other attributes, which can include variegation and strange and very colorful striations:

They mix well with other plants, such as lilies, as evidenced here in the Papa John’s Pizza world headquarters in Louisville – a fascinating bit of landscaping a bit East of town which features not just these gorgeous grasses but an extremely impressive waterfall and lake.

In appreciation of someone’s elegant craftsmanship, the waterfall at Papa Johns:

Some of my favorite grasses we implemented along the mosaic pathways at the Portland, Oregon Chinese Garden, during the construction of that killer city block’s worth of ancient and white hot landscaping: 

One can readily observe the referred-to “softening effect” of such charmingly lumpy and colorful small plants which – when massed – provide  the beginnings of a virtual embrace by the landscaping surrounding this well-crafted walkway.

Smaller and less awe-inspiring grasses such as these rather simple, non-invasive clumps of delicate-bladed grasses, bend in the wind, offering a kinetic green presence which amplifies the senses and presents us with a helpful presence in spotlighting these gorgeous glass sculptures displayed here at Yew Dell Gardens in Louisville as produced by local high school artists and offered for sale at the time.

Grasses can add “peculiarity” to an otherwise somewhat normal environment, not simply because of the fronds, but with the content of its shape as well.

Highlighted here by a load-bearing Sun, the magical look is achieved in the gorgeous fronds of this Miscanthus as the sun highlights it’s crystal-seeming clarity.

I have become an outrageous fan of grasses in general. When combined with the various sedges and water grasses such as Papyrus, the realm of these plants goes from arid to swampy in short order, offering a range of planting possibilities it is nearly impossible to lose at.