A Pretty Late Season Border Idea with Perennials and Architectural Grasses

Add color and form to your garden with late-flowering beauties. Combine architectural ornamental grasses such as Cortaderia selloana (Pampas Grass) with its striking feathery plumes and the statuesque Stipa gigantea (Golden Oats). These eye-catchers will bring a sense of vertical strength in your mixed borders.

Complement your planting with low-growing and long-lasting grasses such as Hakonechloa macra (Hakone Grass), with its cascading mounds of gracefully arching leaves, or Carex oshimensis ‘Evergold’, with its arching creamy-yellow leaves adorned with fine dark green edges. Valuable for their stunning appeal, these highly decorative semi-evergreen grasses provide a lovely contrast with perennial plants.

Welcomed in this design is Stipa arundinacea or Anemanthele lessoniana (Pheasant’s Tail Grass), an elegant, evergreen grass with arching, narrow leaves that turn into attractive shades of copper, gold and bronze in the fall and throughout winter, adding bristling color to the dull winter landscape. Equally evergreen, Stachys byzantina (Lamb’s Ears) is a wonderful plant, mostly grown for its pretty rosettes of velvety, silvery tongue-shaped leaves, resembling lamb’s ears and bringing interest to the border.

Among the perennial flowers selected for this mixed border are Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’, prized for its extremely long blooming season, free flowering Aster x frikartii ‘Jungfrau’, and rosy-purple Echinacea purpurea ‘Magnus’.

Most plants are top performers and have been awarded prestigious awards. Fairly easy to replicate, this plant combination will glow for weeks. Enjoy!