Colorful Ornamental Grasses
Ornamental grasses add a quality of movement to a garden that few other plants do. Lightweight grasses such as Mexican feather grass dance in the wind; mounding grasses sway delicately, brushing the Earth; and tall grasses create living vertical punctuation marks for the mostly horizontal landscape. Color, too, is a benefit of many grasses, which can light up the shade with gold or variegated foliage or glow copper, red, purple and bronze in the sun. Does this Spark an idea?
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Gold and Yellow
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Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra) adds a classic choice for the shady garden. The "Aureola" cultivar adds a bright note with its golden foliage streaked with pink and green. "All Gold" is solid yellow, "Beni Kazi" has red tips, and "Fubuki" is white and green with pink highlights. Other golden grasses include Deschampsia caespitosa "Northern Lights," an 8-inch tuft of fine gold, green and pink foliage, and Bowles golden sedge, which tops its 2-foot-tall golden foliage with bronze-black seed heads.
Red and Purple
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An annual in cold climates, purple fountain grass brings a note of deep burgundy-purple to summer plantings. It grows to a 3-foot-tall arching clump and produces fuzzy seed heads also tipped with purple. Japanese blood grass is a sun-loving perennial grass that spreads to form colonies of 18-inch-tall upright leaves with deep red tips.
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Blue and Gray
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Blue fescue is a fine-bladed evergreen grass that forms a low, spiky tuft from which parchment-colored stems and plumes rise to 2 feet. "Elijah Blue" is the bluest variety. Blue fescue is drought-tolerant and particularly valued for its winter appeal. Blue oat grass is another silver-blue grass with slightly thicker blades. It forms a stiff mound about 3 feet tall and wide and also is evergreen, with parchment stems and plumes. Little bluestem (Schizachyrium spp.) has narrow blue blades that grow about 2 feet tall. As summer progresses, the blades turn a mix of red and purple. "The Blues" and "Blaze" are especially colorful cultivars.
Copper and Bronze
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Many varieties of bronze sedge (Carex spp.) come in brown shades that take on coppery highlights in the sun and intensify in winter. They grow in a soft, hairlike mound to about 2 feet tall and wide. C. testacea is known for its orange tones; C. comans "Milk Chocolate" takes on pink and silver; C. flagellifera "Toffee Twist" has shimmering bronze foliage.
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