Natives, Grasses

Much has been written lately about the benefits of using native plants. I love the idealism and energy of many of those who champion natives, and the idea that natives are a good source for the "right plant" to put in a certain place in your garden makes sense. After all, if a plant is predisposed to living in your soil and climate, you won't be spending a lot of time and effort working to make it happy.

On the flip side, gardening is inherently artificial and I firmly believe that even if you use all natives you will not have a truly "natural" garden. From an artistic standpoint, there are some natives that I feel are not particularly garden-worthy, and some nonnatives that I would hate to do without. And then there is the slippery slope of defining what exactly qualifies a plant as native.

Not every plant labeled "native" is indigenous to my state. Many plants that are Ohio natives, like the gorgeous trillium grandiflorum that grows wild in the woods behind my parents' house, would not be happy in my poor, sandy soil on the Lake Erie shore. Some garden cultivars of popular plants could be a cross between a native parent and a nonnative cousin--or a cultivars of a native plant that was developed in another country. So which plants qualify as native and which ones fail the test? There are many shades of gray in this complex issue.

My personal response has been to try to follow a pragmatic use of natives. I try to keep natives in mind and if it makes sense both practically and aesthetically to use a native, I do. If a nonnative is a better fit and is not potentially invasive, I have no qualms about choosing it instead. And so my garden spans the spectrum between natives and nonnatives, as you see in the second picture. A German-bred cultivar of our lovely native switchgrass, panicum virgatum 'Rotstrahlbusch,' peaks out behind a decidedly exotic 'Wyoming' canna and mingles with an amaranth whose seed was used by Native American tribes in the American Southwest.

Some U.S. natives that I find particularly enjoyable and easy to work into the garden are the native grasses. Bill over at Prairie Point often shows gorgeous pictures of these in their native habitats, and several recent shots featured schizachyrium scoparium--much easier to refer to by its common name, little bluestem. (Call me a chicken, but even with a little help from Fine Gardening Magazine I would never try to pronounce that in front of anyone who knew botanical Latin!)

Bill mentioned in the accompanying post that he wasn't sure why more gardeners didn't use little bluestem as an ornamental. I wholeheartedly agree, as the cultivar 'The Blues' is a stunner in my garden. Carefree blue foliage that deepens to reddish pink in the fall, relatively drought tolerant, fine in full or part sun--not much to complain about there!

Here you see one of my two 3-plant clumps of little bluestem. This one lives on the southeastern corner of my house where it gets full sun until about 2pm. Behind it is a pyracantha that I am beginning to train against the wall and beside it is the same clump of canna that you see in the switchgrass picture above.

At 2 years old they have not yet reached their mature height of 3-4 feet, but already they provide a nice vertical line in the garden. These fine-textured verticals soften the potentially jarring transition between the harsh line of the 2-story house the wide garden bed next to it.

One last native grass that I adore is Indiangrass, sorghastrum nutans. I was initially intrigued by the hue of the blades on 'Sioux Blue,' but it was the inflourescences that made me go back to Bluestone Perennials and order two more this spring. (You can see these in the very first picture at the top of this post.) They glowed golden in the setting sun from late summer on, with the color reminding me of glittering fields of wheat back home.

In this picture, you see the oldest and tallest of my three plants with its new neighbors: lilium, chocolate eupatorium, 'Regina' heuchera, horehound, a variegated sedum, purple leaf clover and a patch of 'Crow Feather' tiarella. The sorghastrum was chosen for this shallow "driveway bed" because it has a relatively slim profile compared to other grasses of similar height, like miscanthus. The two newer 'Sioux Blue' are evenly spaced along a 20 foot stretch of this same bed in an effort to give the area some repetition and help me avoid that bitty look.

I do have a few other U.S. native grasses on my radar for future consideration. Next year I want to reseed my back yard with a lawn of blue grama grass now that High Country Gardens put that on my radar, and there is a lovely new cultivar of little bluestem called 'Blaze' that features dark orange fall foliage... but I admit that I also hope that my clumps of the bronze carex buchanii, which hails from New Zealand, grow enough to warrant dividing next year.