Add romance and hazy color to your life—and create instant curb appeal—by planting perennials grasses in a front yard, alongside a path, or as a mini meadow.
Hardy, drought-tolerant perennials grasses are year-round friends who will turn golden and feathery in winter months. The graceful, architectural clumps are equally striking when planted in broad swathes or as punctuation in an ornamental garden bed.
Grasses are a cornerstone of a naturalistic style of landscape design that owes its current popularity to Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf, whose planting schemes recently transformed an eyesore elevated railroad track into New York City's magnificent High Line park. We've borrowed a few ideas from him and other garden designers to come up with a list of ways to add curb appeal with grasses:
Crowd Control
Above: Photograph via Adam Woodruff & Associates.
On a busy corner lot in Springfield, Illinois, garden designer Adam Woodruff replaced his own front lawn with a modern interpretation of a cottage garden. The mix of low-maintenance perennials, ornamental grasses, and shrubs creates a colorful mini meadow and dissuades pedestrians to stay on the sidewalk instead of taking a shortcut across his yard.
Woodruff included a number of grasses in the mix, including Sesleria autumnalis, Sporobolus heterolepis, Spodiopogon sibiricus, Calamagrostis x acutiflora 'Karl Foerster’, and Molinia litoralis ‘Transparent'.
Above: Close-up views of Woodruff's planting schemes reveal how he created a painterly effect. At (L) is a mix of Helenium ‘Mardis Gras’, Origanum laevigatum ‘Herrenhausen’, Baptisia ‘Purple Smoke’, Astilbe chinensis ‘Purpurkerze’, Eryngium yuccifolium, and Perovskia atriplicifolia. At (R), plants include Amsonia hubrichtii, Perovskia atriplicifolia, and Salvia ‘May Night' .
Front Lawn Fix
Above: Photograph via Lucas and Lucas.
Healdsburg, CA-based landscape architects Lucas and Lucas substituted drought-tolerant perennial grasses for turf in Sonoma, creating a low-water front lawn that glows golden at sunset.
Pathway Border
Above: In Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf's own garden, he planted low-growing late-season grasses to avoid obscuring the view. Interspersed are such perennials as Veroniscastrum virginicum (R) and clumps of taller Molinia caerulea grasses.
For more of Oudolf's grassy garden designs, see Required Reading: How to Recreate Piet Oudolf's Painterly Landscapes.
Above: Photograph via Davis LA.
If you want to recreate Oudolf's planting scheme, Molinia caerulea is a hardy perennial in growing zones 5-9 and thrives in full sun. A Large Field Clump Of Molinia Caerulea is $12 from Bluestem Nursery.
Pots & Planters
Above: Our DIY planters editor Julie Chai created deep purple drama with millet in a pot. For a materials list and step-by-step instructions, see DIY Patio Planter: Dark and Stormy Shades.
Cottage Garden Makeover
Above: Photograph via Sarah Price Landscapes.
British garden designer Sarah Price added low-maintenance grasses to ornamental borders to create drama and height in a historic cottage garden in Oxfordshire.
Above: Photograph via Sarah Price Landscapes.
A detail of Price's planting scheme reveals how she used a simple, pared-down palette of sedum, salvias, origanum, erigeron, and Stipa gigantea to create structure, texture, and color all year.
Foundation Garments
Above: Photograph by Christine Chitnis for Gardenista. For more of this garden, see At Home with Rhode Island Artist Georgia Marsh.
In a Rhode Island garden, artist Georgia Marsh planted grasses along the foundation of the house, using them as a hedging plant to add an extra layer to the garden.
Punctuation Marks
Above: Photograph by Christine Chitnis for Gardenista. For more of this garden, see At Home with Rhode Island Artist Georgia Marsh.
A single clump of tall grasses creates height and depth in an ornamental garden bed at artist Georgia Marsh's home in Rhode Island.
Fence Substitute
Above: Photograph by Matthew Williams for Gardenista. For more of this garden, see An Architect at Home: A Kitchen Garden on Cape Cod.
Tall clumps of grasses "hide a multitude of sins" in architect Sheila Bonnell's Cape Cod garden, where they soften the look of a chicken wire fence that surrounds the vegetable garden.
Garden Sculpture
Above: South Africa-based landscape designer Franchesca Watson uses tall grasses to create focal points to draw the eye in a suburb of Constantia. For more of this garden, see Garden Designer Visit: A Study in Green by Franchesca Watson.
A clump of grasses, deliberately sited, can have the same visual power as a three-dimensional statue in a garden.
For more of our favorite ways to use plants to create curb appeal, see:
- Front Door Fashion: 9 Ways to Create Curb Appeal with Boxwood.
- 9 Ways to Create Curb Appeal with Flowering Vines and Climbers.
- DIY: Container of the Month Pots & Planters.
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