Tough, adaptable grasses will happily tolerate less-than-hospitable urban situations. By this riverside in New York, Panicum virgatum brings a natural touch to what might otherwise be an unpromising hardscape—for humans as well as other forms of life. Photograph courtesy of Ross Humphrey.
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my grandfather was very keen on delphiniums and during my summer visits to his expansive garden I came to love them too. Uninspiring mounds of green foliage would gradually form tall, graceful, towering spikes of colour that, at least in the earlier years, towered over the top of my head. Some of my earliest memories involve being captivated by the sheer beauty of the flowers, the colours and the way they were arranged on the stems. In time I started my own plant collections, expanding to dahlias and delphiniums, and would spend hours observing their mind-boggling variety of shape, form and colour. I became transfixed by my plants’ growing cycles—the complex processes they underwent in the course of a single season, and the way they would react differently to the various conditions that could exist in the same garden. (Grass, on the other hand, was merely for walking on.)
Growing up and beginning to explore in earnest, I visited as many gardens as I could, increasingly enchanted by these magical places where lots of different plants grew together. While most of my friends aspired to become train drivers and secret agents, I dreamt of becoming a gardener and eventually having my own garden. I spent every possible moment around plants and people who knew about them.
By the time I came to Knoll Gardens in Dorset, my love affair with plants as individuals had been supplanted by a fascination with gardens as systems or communities of plants, and the processes that make them work. Having spent years looking after gardens professionally for others, I had witnessed the most attractive of plants become ugly and disappointing under conditions that they did not like. I came to understand that seeing the garden as a whole, with its various moods and conditions, was just as important as understanding the plants that go in it.
‘Right plant, right place’ is a simple practical maxim encouraging us to choose plants that will best suit the conditions available. So many gardens fail because this simple piece of common sense is ignored or forgotten. Certainly soil can be improved, water added and climatic factors softened to some extent, but essentially for a garden to be successful its plants must be happy with, or at least able to tolerate, the prevailing cultural conditions.
Knoll, for instance, was originally a private botanical collection, principally containing woody plants drawn from around the world; while many like the eucalyptus and euonymus took to the garden’s generally dry, sandy conditions, others such as the collection of rhododendrons needed copious amounts of water and feeding to survive and prosper. Once this level of care was stopped, it became obvious that these rhododendrons would not thrive in the garden’s conditions if left on their own, so they have since been largely removed.
WHY GRASSES? At first woody plants were my gardening mainstay, but I later found that grasses were effective in the garden for nearly as long as the woody plants were—and that grasses provided not only structure and form but also movement and a range of talents to perfectly complement most other plants. Grasses were also versatile and adaptable, capable of growing on sandy soils or heavy clay, in sun or shade, in pools or other wet areas and even among root systems under trees. And when used together in larger informal drifts they created a feeling of relaxed naturalness that, to me, hinted strongly at childhood days spent on coasts and other exciting, invigorating and untamed grassy places.
As if this were not enough, I soon found that a ‘naturalistic’ approach to gardening spearheaded by the use of grasses led to noticeably less work than I had been accustomed to doing. (The term ‘naturalistic’ can be used to describe a generally less formal approach to the layout and design of plantings, where a limited but well-chosen palette of plants is used for maximum effect with minimal work.) Not having to constantly deadhead, stake, tidy and spray slowly encouraged a subtly different sort of environment—one perhaps just beginning to mimic the flavour of an established natural system, which a greater variety of wildlife seemed to find attractive. As I drew upon an ever-widening palette of grasses, their usefulness and adaptability became clear.
GRASSES AND THE BIGGER PICTURE Grasses are a worldwide success story—a huge group of plants with more than ten thousand different species in their own family, and with the grass allies such as sedges and rushes contributing at least half that number again. They are arguably the most successful group of plants on the planet, covering more ground and feeding more wildlife than any other group. In our natural systems, grasses and their allies can be found on virtually every landmass, in every region, in every locality and on every soil type. Wherever there is plant life, grasses are almost certain to have a local representative.
Like many gardeners, designers and conservationists working today, I have come to realize that gardens can be more than just decoration. To be sure they are pleasant havens to be relaxed in and admired, but as our understanding of the world evolves, perhaps so do our attitudes towards gardening.
We are learning about biodiversity, the all-embracing term for all forms of life including mammals, birds, insects and plants. And we are learning about our collective effect on all of these living things; as sensitive and environmentally savvy gardeners, we are trying not to waste valuable long-term resources on short-term horticultural effects. We are learning that continually taking over natural areas for our own use puts increased pressure on the remaining natural systems—and that the intricacy and interrelatedness of these systems can be all too easily interrupted, yet not so easily mended.
While much of the countryside is regarded as green open space, farmland and gardens with large expanses of tightly cut turfgrass, including golf courses, can become effective monocultures that are austere places for most other forms of life.
Above all, we are learning that our gardens and designed spaces increasingly constitute a significant part of the Earth’s remaining green space, and that our gardens are therefore gaining a value that could never have been imagined by previous generations of gardeners. As we rely on our natural systems to support us for food, shelter and the air we breathe, we are inextricably bound up with the plants, insects and animals that make up our world’s biodiversity. As natural habitats are destroyed and the natural landscape is built up, the value of our gardens increases—if we design these outdoor spaces conscientiously. Although they cannot be a replacement for natural ecosystems, our gardens can serve as a partial substitute, providing a place for the plants, insects and animals on which we ourselves depend.
Understanding grasses’ origins and their contributions to the wider ecosystem inspires us see our gardens differently. Grasses can offer us insight into a way of working—an approach to gardening that combines a focus on adaptability, ease of use and sheer simplicity with the most strikingly beautiful of effects.
BLURRING AND MERGING If asked to sum up what I have learned through gardening with grasses so far, I think I would have to invent a new phrase: ‘blur and merge’.
It is in our interests to blur the lines between our natural systems and our designed spaces, and grasses are perhaps the perfect group of plants to help us do this. Natural systems offer well-adjusted, self-renewing, evolving communities while our gardens are all too often the very opposite; we have much to learn from them. The principles we see operating so successfully in nature can be mirrored in our designed spaces with real benefits.
And we can merge our love of short-term interest with longer-term satisfaction. Blowsy summertime flowers are wonderful, but not at the price of boring nothingness for the rest of the year. Gardens can and should be of interest at all times.
Grasses are found in virtually every area from high mountain-top to seashore, and they play an important role in today’s modern, low-maintenance, nature-tolerant gardens. This naturally occurring meadow in Utah’s Zion National Park is a balanced, self-renewing plant community from which we can draw inspiration for our gardens.
Rather than lawn grass and surrounding borders or flowerbeds, this garden area has merged these traditional features, resulting in a meadow effect. Not only is the area fun to play in and explore but it is also easier to maintain and gives a greater sense of space and openness.
The designer of this Carmel garden, on the Pacific Coast of California, has successfully blurred the line between lawn and border to create a pleasing combination of sedges and a grass, Koeleria macrantha, that has been used as a low-maintenance substitute for more traditional turf grass.
We can blur the often-sacrosanct lines between border and lawn, between trimmed hedge and natural shelter. Narrow borders and tightly cut lawns are static and unchanging, and moreover they are usually hard work. Blending borders, lawns and pathways creates a feeling of space and dynamism. And it allows plants to do more of the work.
We can merge our focus on plants as individuals with the cultivation of the garden as a whole. Far greater success, and for less effort, can be achieved by cultivating the garden as a community, rather than seeing plants as a series of unrelated individuals.
We can blur our search for horticultural perfection with the acceptance of practicality. Plants that need constant attention by way of spraying, staking, deadheading, watering and general cosseting in order to give anything in return are for the most part just hard work—and often unnecessary, when so many plants will exist happily with almost no attention.
In this golf links, low-maintenance native sedges and grasses grow close to the traditionally maintained links without compromising the integrity of the playing surface.
A crisp, well-maintained lawn can be a thing of beauty, but many are now questioning the validity of this long-established tradition, especially where such features are expensive in terms of the time and precious resources needed to maintain them.
We can also merge our conception of indoor rooms with outdoor spaces. While we lavish much care and attention on our indoor rooms, our outdoor spaces benefit from similar care. Basic garden design is not a fashion accessory—it is merely a thought process intended to make the best use of finite space and resources, and it is a valuable tool for any gardener.
Simply using grasses in the garden is no panacea in itself. But grasses’ inclination towards success under so many different and sometimes challenging conditions, and the feelings and effects they evoke though a happy combination of individual beauty and mass effect, make them incredibly valuable.
This book is about the grasses that I enjoy, and how to use them in our gardens and designed spaces. It is also about why we might want to use grasses, and it looks to our natural systems for that answer.
This book is not just for established gardeners; it is for anyone who takes an interest in outdoor spaces, whether surrounding a small private home or in a larger public space. With an eye towards naturalistic gardening and environmental awareness, I hope to explore how such a worldwide success story as the family of grasses can be used so effectively and easily in our gardens.
Grasses and their potential in planting design is a huge subject which no single book can claim to comprehensively cover. But it is my hope that the following pages will provide you with a real flavour—a taste of the amazing opportunities that this versatile and beautiful group of plants has to offer.
