Well, we think it’s M. sinensis – it could be M. strictus – they are very similar, and are allegedly well mixed up in the trade;  we think ours is M. sinensis, but it doesn’t really have the arching stems that it’s supposed to, so we have our doubts.

We don’t really like grasses – we love their form and the architectural interest they add to a border, we love their texture and the way they sway in the breeze, we love their almost year-long interest and that they look stunning frosted in a winter garden….but we can’t stand the way they seed themselves around.

Look, no seeds!

Some plants are prolific seeders;  foxgloves, campanulas, verbenas and many others all carpet our borders with thousands of tiny seedlings each year.   But they’re easily controlled – one swipe of the hoe and they’re done for.   Grass seedlings are so much more robust;  even if you catch them really young they’re fantastically resilient, and we find only thorough hand weeding will keep them under control.   Unfortunately, we don’t have an army of under-gardeners we can task with this, so ornamental grasses mostly get designed out of our garden.

With one exception of course.   M. s. ‘zebrinus’ is an extraordinary plant.   The conventional husbandry is to cut the old growth down to the ground in late winter;  new growth then appears in the spring, but is clear green.   It grows for several months, and then, just as you’re thinking you’ll need to pull it out because it must have reverted, the yellow stripes appear.   Not only on new growth as you might expect, but along the full length of the foliage (which by this time will be 2 – 3 feet tall).

From  mid-summer until autumn you’ll enjoy an increasingly bold clump of lovely, vigorous, yellow-striped foliage.   Flowers appear in the autumn, and last right through winter, but (and this is the clever bit, at least for the grass seed phobic) the flowers are either sterile, or simply so late that they never develop viable seeds.   We’ve searched many reference sources but can’t find a definitive answer to this, but either way you don’t get seeds, and that means no pesky seedlings!

So there we have it – the best of all possible worlds;  lovely architectural plants, probably the most interesting foliage of any grass, modestly sized so it’ll fit most gardens (there’s a lot of HUGE grasses out there!) almost year round interest, and….no weeding!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 12:00 and is filed under Plants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.