Molinia Dauerstrahl (purple moor grass) and verbena bonariensis
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Grass-tastic! Ornamental grasses are one of the easiest groups of plants to design with in a coastal location. By our gardening correspondent, Gill Maccabe
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ast or west, which is best? I’m not talking about the beaches of our home Island, but the gardens and the difference a few miles can make.
Everything takes a little bit longer and requires more care and persuasion apart, that is, for ornamental grasses, one of the easiest groups of plants to design with on (and above) the coast.
As a relative newcomer to the west, from small sheltered gardens in the east where everything grew quickly and slugs were the biggest problem, I’ve had to adapt to the challenges thrown by our one acre of heavy clay soil in the exposed northwest of the Island, battered by harsh westerlies for much of the winter and drying winds in the summer.
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It’s a constant learning curve; at the same time as eastern dwellers are apologising to neighbours for their invasive clematis in late April, we are still waiting for our buds to burst into flower and get ridiculously excited when more than half of a fruit tree develops blossom - before it is invariably blown away prematurely.
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Many gardens that are quite close to the coast, while having to endure the occasional salt-laden gale, can in fact grow a range of plants that seem overall to tolerate these conditions
Almost every one of the common UK varieties tolerate salt-laden spray or harsh ocean winds – and they are enjoying huge popularity as more gardeners are persuaded to create more naturalistic gardens. When close friends moved to the coastal park area of St Ouen a few years ago, they had to totally rethink their gardening strategy to cope with the unfamiliar soil and conditions. They laid out their half acre plot in undulating curves of miscanthus sinensis gnome, which produces little compact mounds of narrow foliage topped by freely produced pink flowers; the compact imperata cylindrical rubra, sometimes known as Japanese blood grass, which bears brilliant red spikes that fade to bright green at the base and become translucent with age; and calamagrostis karl foerstrer, which some think is like a miniature pampas grass.
