Colour up with grasses

Add texture, form, movement and, best of all, some drama

Where would we be without trusty grasses to fill out gaps or provide very low maintenance life and structure in our gardens?

Ornamental grasses don’t have to just be a wheat-coloured backdrop to more dramatic flowering plants, sometimes they can be the stars of the show, too, in a range of colours to suit your scheme.

Ever since Piet Oudolf, the great Dutch designer, inspired gardeners everywhere to incorporate more of them into our plots for a naturalistic, prairie-type style, many different species in a range of colours and forms have become more available to us in garden centres and nurseries.

Plant them well to begin with and they’ll last for you – all you need to do then is give them a trim in spring, divide them every so often, and you’ve got yourself a hardworking, easy-going perennial that you don’t have to worry about.

There are countless to try, but here we’ve focused on the more compact, bright and breezy, easy-grow grasses for a stand-out spectrum of colour, which you can either plant or try sowing now. They’re all loosely categorised under the grass label, but in the case of sedges and mondo grass, they’re simply grass-like perennials – but they act like grasses and look like them with their spidery or wispy leaves, so they’re often lumped in with them in garden designs! Pick some of these and enjoy a more dynamic garden as a result.