When you’re planning your natural garden, some of the easiest go-to plants are ornamental grasses, groundcovers and ferns. Not only do they offer a wide range of luxurious textures and colors, they’re generally hardy specimens – thriving where other plants would struggle to survive. Used in mass, these plants can unify a garden design. Used as an accent, they can be quite striking.
A simple meadow of mixed native grasses and wildflowers creates a quiet respite. It’s common to use mowing to define rooms in such a setting, but here the effect is wild and rustic.
Photo Credit: ©2001 Dolezal Publishing/Doug Dealey
Ornamental grasses are adaptable, tough perennials that bring elegant movement and beauty to any garden.
Photo Credit: James H. Schutte
Foamflower is a low-carpeting perennial that likes partial shade and moist, humus-rich soil – making it an ideal groundcover for a woodland garden.
Photo Credit: Mark Kane
Ostrich fern needs humus-rich soil and partial shade. It can be naturalized in moist woodland gardens or along a stream.
Photo Credit: Maureen Gilmer
Ornamental Grasses
Most ornamental grasses (as opposed to turfgrasses) are grown as perennials. They create varied levels to form screens, backgrounds and accents. Their simple elegance adds movement and grace to many natural garden themes.
Most ornamental grasses grow in full sun to partial shade. Adaptable and tough, these plants tolerate a wide range of soil types and growing conditions. Ornamental grasses are low-maintenance, hardly needing much beyond an annual trim. Their fibrous roots are great at gleaning water from the soil, and they’re generally pretty drought-tolerant.
Many ornamental grasses grow quite large, so make sure to site and space them correctly in your garden, following plant information found on the label or in the Learn2Grow Plant Database. Spring is the best time to plant most selections. You can find them in nursery containers or as bare-root divisions.
Groundcovers
Groundcovers are most commonly used to form a garden floor. Most often perennials, you can find these plants in a range of textures and heights, and they can be deciduous or evergreen. Some selections also produce vivid seasonal color, flowers and berries. In addition to replacing high-maintenance turf, groundcovers also cool the soil, conserve moisture, reduce erosion, discourage weeds and serve as a living mulch beneath trees and shrubs. From a design perspective, groundcovers unify and soften. A drift of plants can blend boundaries between planting areas and paths, merge structural features into the garden and frame specimen trees.
New groundcover plantings require regular watering and weeding until they’re established. After that, add a layer of organic mulch to help conserve water and suppress weeds. You’ll enjoy a planting that looks good year-round and requires little care. For unity of design, limit plantings to a few species.
Ferns
Talk about tough plants! Ferns, though delicate in appearance, have been around for hundreds of millions of years. If you’ve got a shady spot that’s poorly suited to sun-loving species, it just might be the perfect place for a verdant swath of ferns. Look for them at garden retailers specializing in native and shade plants. They also make wonderful companions to wildflowers and seasonal bulbs in a woodland garden.
Most ferns need moist, well-drained soil, high in organic matter. So before planting, give your ferns a boost by amending your planting holes with organic matter like compost. Also give your plantings an annual mulching. In the spring, watch for the delicate shoots (called fiddleheads) to emerge from the soil. Within a few weeks, they’ll unfold to those familiar feathery fronds.
Natural gardens need tough plants that can withstand various conditions. Planting ornamental grasses, groundcovers and ferns is the perfect – and beautiful – way to enhance the garden.
