Ornamental grasses come in a wide range of heights, so there's a perfect choice for any spot from the front edge to the very back of the border. Another obvious consideration for garden design is colour, and here you can use grasses to your advantage in several ways.
If you need a dependable, even-toned foil behind more airy flowering plants, dense clumps of green-leaved grasses make a handsome backdrop for pale or wispy blooms, such as airy white gaura (Gaura lindheimeri), pale yellow scabious, and steel-blue globe thistles (Echinops ritro), which can easily get lost against a less distinct background. Green grasses also work well for separating strong colours and boldly patterned blooms, such as the intense red heads of Maltese cross (Lychnis chalcedonica) and the bull's-eye stripes of blanket flower (Gaillardia x grandiflora). Grass foliage makes its own colour contribution to the border, and it's hard not to be tempted by the surprising variety of foliage colour choices, from yellow, red, and orange, to brown, blue, or even multihued. Gold, silver, copper, or bronze flower clusters and seed heads, when caught by light, cast an almost metallic sheen over the entire garden setting.
Beyond colour, grasses have other assets to offer beds and borders - most notably, form and texture. A fair number of traditional border denizens possess distinct upright or mounded forms, making the arching habits of many grasses a welcome transition between the two. And when you consider the dramatic contrast of fine textured grasses against the bold foliage of hostas and cannas - to name just a few broad-leaved border favourites - it's easy to see that possibilities for outstanding combinations abound.
A subtler benefit comes from a less tangible quality of most grasses, and it may be the best of all the contributions grasses make to a bed or border: they add a softer, more natural feel to even the most precisely planned plantings, evoking the free-for-all charm of a flower-studded meadow while maintaining the tidiness and balance of a carefully cultivated border.
As they mature, ornamental grasses provide exciting changes throughout the summer months just when most borders shine, but they're interesting at unexpected times, too. The autumn foliage colours of warm-season grasses, for instance, can rival some of the showiest deciduous shrubs and trees. Their winter colours are more muted, but the russets, golds, and tans are still welcome. Cool-season grasses, too, shine during the colder months, bridging the gap between the last of the autumn-flowering perennials and the earliest spring bulbs.
When choosing grasses for beds and borders, keep in mind their relative tendencies to creep or self-sow. There are some truly beautiful creeping grasses, but unless you're prepared to contain them at planting time, you may rue the day you ever let them loose in your border.
Clump-formers and slow spreaders are less likely to crowd out bed and border companions, but some multiply almost as rapidly because they are overly generous with their seed production, leaving you with a dilemma: do you cut off the seed heads in fall and lose their winter show, or let them stand and deal with weeding out the unwanted seedlings the following year? In established beds and borders, you can probably get away with the latter approach because there's not much bare soil for the seeds to drop into, and adding a fresh layer of mulch each spring can keep volunteers to a minimum. But in a newer landscape with lots of exposed soil, removing the seed heads in fall might be a better option.
Most ornamental grasses adapt readily to the same growing conditions that typical border plants appreciate: full sun to light shade, and well-drained soil that doesn't dry out completely. Nutrient needs, however, differ. While traditional wisdom calls for frequent applications of fertilizer to keep border perennials blooming, overly fertile soil can lead to too-lush, floppy growth in grasses. For new gardens, rather than enriching the soil in the whole bed before planting, one way to address the problem is to add soil amendments to the individual holes where you plant perennials but no fertilizer where you plant grasses. During the subsequent growing seasons, you might consider using a compost mulch in spring, with fewer or lighter feedings in summer, or no additional fertilizer at all. Of course, you could also fertilize the perennials as usual and simply stake your grasses, or shear them back in early summer to promote more compact regrowth; it all depends on how much additional work you want to do.
Visit your local Garden Centre to find out the various ornamental grasses they have on offer.
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