Category: Ornamentals
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Ornamental beauty in Winter Park, Colorado: Festuca glauca
We are visiting the ski town of Winter Park in Colorado (after a week stay at nearby Breckenridge), and two days back we had stopped at the Winter Park & Fraser Chamber building to inquire about hiking trails near the town. The rather large building serves as the welcome center for people staying at the…
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Eragrostis spectabilis: They Grow Up So Fast
A couple of months ago, I decided to start some ornamental grasses from seeds. One of the seeds I bought was for Eragrostis spectabilis, a native that in its flowering adult form bears a slight resemblance to the Muhlenbergia ornamentals that I already had in my garden. The seeds were the tiniest of the lot,…
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A Parking Lot’s Cenchrus Celebration
Cenchrus (Pennisetum) varieties are a mainstay of the ornamental grass industry. Even in areas here in Florida where the community tries to stick to native ornamental grasses like Eragrostis spp, Trypsacum spp, and Muhlenbergia spp, I have seen Cenchrus spp used liberally in order to add season-long color. Recently, I came upon a parking lot…
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Growing Ornamental Grasses from Seed
Surprisingly, although I’ve grown rice from seed all the way to harvesting, I’ve actually never grown ornamental grasses from seed. So this year I decided I’d try my luck at it. On the face of it, it seems to make sense to grow grasses from seed, given that you can easily buy hundreds (or even…
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Muhly Mania at Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
There were two places at Austin, TX that I wanted to visit. One was the Half Pint Prairie at the University of Texas at Austin’s campus (a student project from the Covid years that turned a small plot smack-dab in the middle of the city into a mini prairie), and the other was UT Austin’s…
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Muhlenbergia capillaris: Going native ain’t bad at all
The Florida community I live in has an HOA that mandates that all landscape plants be native to the region. This means that all the colorful and robust ornamental imports that people would normally gravitate to are off limits to homeowners. In some ways, this might have been a negative, given that one cannot select…