Grasses are trendy.

Riding and lamp-cleaning grass, switchgrass or Chinese reeds are decorating more and more gardens.

Where the little ones that make up the lawn are sheared, ornamental grasses are allowed to grow and develop their full splendor.

Plant nurseries offer dozens of varieties.

But which grass is right for a bed?

To decide that, it is important to familiarize yourself with the general and diverse characteristics of these plants.

Grasses colonize the world.

They are the pioneers, they are quick to seize the opportunity.

Sweet grasses and sedge plants are the most common.

If the soil is damp or wet, rushes and cattails grow.

In the southern hemisphere, there are also restaurant crops.

Several - sometimes several hundred - genera belong to each of these five large families, and there are several thousand species.

Only a small fraction of it makes it into a perennial bed: those that seem particularly attractive and that don't spread too much.

Even the gardener Karl Foerster dealt extensively with the “hair of mother earth”, as he, often quoted, called the grass.

In the mid-1950s he wrote the book "Entry of the Grasses and Ferns into the Gardens", which has long been a standard work.

Good partners

But it would take several decades for the grasses to really arrive. Wolfgang Oehme and Kurt Bluemel, two German gardeners who emigrated to the USA, played a part in this. Oehme has been planning and planting unconventional, extensive herbaceous borders with grasses since the 1970s, which his colleague Kurt Bluemel used. This inspired garden designer Petra Pelz around twenty years later. Ernst Pagels, on the other hand, a gardener in northern Germany, has been harvesting Chinese reed varieties since the 1980s. In the meantime, gardens without airy stalks and ears are hardly conceivable. They form the opposite pole to the foliage of hosta and bergenia, to coneflower or dahlia flowers.

When planting, not only the perspective and site conditions have to be considered, but also whether the grass sprouts early like the riding grass or rather late like the Chinese reed, whether it gets dry in winter or stays green like the sedge.

In any case, grass is a good structure builder and should only be cut back in spring.

Because then it adorns the bed even in the barren months.

Reliable riding grass

It looks familiar in its appearance, its more inconspicuous relatives are known from woods and meadows. The garden equestrian grass (

Calamagrostis x acutiflora

) grows upright, it is a hybrid that also occurs in nature. The best known variety is "Karl Foerster". The green foliage sprouts early in the year, and in summer the stalks grow to a meter and a half. The inflorescences remain erect even when they turn dry and yellowish-brown. In addition to “Karl Foerster”, the “Waldenbuch” variety is often planted, the silvery panicles of which are slightly larger.

Diamondgrass (

Calamagrostis brachytricha

),

on the other hand, is more conspicuous and almost attracts attention

.

Large, very fine ears sit on long stalks.

Up close they look enchanting, from a distance they tend to cause clouds to form in the bed: because the individual inflorescences form something like a pale purple fog.

This in turn works well between clearer structures, for example those of autumn anemones, candle knotweed or smaller trees.

In the sunny place on fresh ground, they are good partners for all riding grasses.