Showing posts with label autumn garden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label autumn garden. Show all posts
Autumn has gone now but the splendid autumn grasses have motivated me to publish on them. These ornamental grasses are splendid in autumn but they can really transcend any season. Many of these grasses like Ravenna, Calamagrostis and tall Miscanthuses, can be left standing all winter. They perform elegantly in the garden for almost ten months of the year when they are cut back in very early spring to spur them intio another season's growth. Some of Carexes and other few retain their color for the whole year.
http://www.saversplanet.com/wallpapers/autumn-grass-wallpapers_10612_1600x1200.jpg
They are increasingly used in parks and public plantings, commercial landscaping of office buildings and even fast-food restaurants. They are quite easy to maintain, like they are cut back close to ground once a year and incidentally provide good attractive material for mulching. The best thing about these grasses is to observe them grow and change with the season. Additionally they grow very rapidly.
http://outdoorlifestyledesigns.com/ornamental_grasses.html
They are increasingly used in parks and public plantings, commercial landscaping of office buildings and even fast-food restaurants. They are quite easy to maintain, like they are cut back close to ground once a year and incidentally provide good attractive material for mulching. The best thing about these grasses is to observe them grow and change with the season. Additionally they grow very rapidly.
The elegant heights of these grasses make them conspicuous and well-suited for every type of garden. The appeal of these grasses lies mainly in their diversity.
Holcus mollis 'Variegatus', commonly known as variegated velvet grass for its green and white striped leaves with pinkish overtones and for its downy texture, grows no more than six inches high. It spreads a bit, but Festuca ovina 'Glauca' forms little domes or mounds, also low to the ground at about eight inches.
Carex morrowii 'Variegata' forms not a mound but a mop.
Grasses of intermediate size include Helictotrichon sempervirens, which makes spiky clumps about three feet high, with leaves arching gracefully at their tips.
http://www.bluestem.ca/images/helictotrichon-semp-04.jpg
There is also Pennisetum alopecuroides or fountain grass, which grows around 3.5 to 4 feet tall and produces an abundance of feathery, pink-toned flowers in late summer. Fountain grasses never overwhelm its neighbors in border. Growing them around yuccas for contrast make a nice combination.
http://www.ausgardener.com.au/product_images/x/pennisetum_fountain_grass__35678.jpg
Among the miscanthuses, Miscanthus sinensis 'Gracillimus' which grows between four and six feet tall and makes a fine upright accent in a border.
http://www.overdam.dk/mis-gracillimus.jpg
Calamagrostis acutiflora 'Stricta', with soft green leaves that weep slightly, forms a mound. In midsummer its narrow, erect, silvery pink flower spikes rise to five feet.
http://www.gapphotos.com/images/WebPreview/0046/0046061.jpg
These grasses also vary widely in their color, both in a single species over the span of the year and from one species to the next.
The leaves of Miscanthus sinensis, a good shade of green in late spring and summer, gradually change to light tan as the autumn gets on, and its pink flower tassels go through several transformations, changing to pale, pale gold, then to straw, and finally to light beige.
http://www.bellevuebotanical.org/plantmonth/miscanthus_sinensis.jpg
Lyme grass (Elymus canadensis), a spreading and stoloniferous low plant that is tough enough to grow, is a pale gray-blue.
http://www.nicerweb.com/doc/class/pix/PRAIRIE/2005_07_27/Elymus_canadensis.jpg
Some of the fescues and blue oat grasses (Helictotrichon semperviens) are still bluer.
http://www.gardenexpress.com.au/images/P/Blue_fescue_07-01.jpg
Miscanthus sinensis 'Purpurascens' develops red tints in summer and by early October is almost scarlet.
http://www.landscapedia.info/images/plant_images/Miscanthus_sinensis_purpurascens_silvergrassFlame_Grass_550_550.jpg
Panicum virgatum 'Rubrum', the red switch grass, shows reddish tones in the summer and turns crimson when night begin to cool down.
http://dovecreekgardens.com/images%2Fproducts%2F2008%2Fpanicum%20virgatum%20rotstrahlbusch.jpg
The champion of all the red grasses is Japanese blood grass (Imperata cylindrica 'Rubra'). Its leaves are dark burgundy for half their length at least from the time they first emerge in the spring. The color deepens in September and spreads to the entire length of the leaves. It is ensational when grown in combination with silver-stemmed Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) and blue oat grass.
Another Carex, Carex buchananii, is more of a novelty than a thing of beauty.
Besides their subtle colors, ornamental grasses bring to the garden the important elements of movement and sound.
Great Britain and United States of America are different in many ways including the seasonal differences, like a different autumn. Here different autumn means that autumn spreads the gloomy message across the whole Great Britain, while in United States it’s still the season of collecting smiles if garden little wisely. This big difference, on seasonal or gardening grounds, is also quite visible in the literature of both nations. If we critically get through the poetry of these nations, we come to know that the specs of their poets towards autumn are totally different. Like British nature poets, on comfortable and lyrical ground with spring and summer, turn dour and unenthusiastic when autumn is the topic. Keats, in his ode “To Autumn” writes that
Then in wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.....
(http://charlottemasoneducation.files.wordpress.com/2007)
Thomas Hood’s “ode: Autumn” mentions
I saw old autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Slience, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn.....
On another place, this British romantic poet adds completely no to autumn in his poem “No”, as follows:
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member----
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds----
November!
Tennyson was equally lugubrious in his poem “Song”:
The air is damp and hushed and close,
As a sick man’s room when he taketh repose
An hour before death----
My very heart faints and the whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath,
And the year’s last rose.
Alexander Pope’s Third Pastoral, “Autumn,” mentions similarly gloomy thoughts:
Ye flowers that droop, forsaken by the spring,
Ye birds that, left by summer, cease to sing,
Ye trees that fade when autumn heats remove,
Say, is not absence death to those who love.
To the contrary, if British poetry about autumn is dismal and cheerless, American poetry is strikingly sunny and bright. Thoreau was enamored of the pleasure that fall brings:
The moon now rises to her absolute rule,
And the husbandman and the hunter
Acknowledge her for their mistress.
Asters and goldenrod reign in the fields
And the life everlasting withers not.
The fields are reaped and shorn of their pride
But an inward verdure still crowns them;
The thistle scatters its down on the pool
And yellow leaves clothe the river----
And nought disturbs the serious life of men.
And Emily Dickinson, writing about the native fringed gentian, a late bloomer often the victim of a sudden frost, shows no melancholy whatsoever, but only delight in its beauty-----
But just before the snows
There came a purple creature
That ravished all the hill:
And summer hid her forehead,
And mockery was still.
The frosts were her conditions:
The Tyrian would not come
Until the North evoked it,
“Creator! shall I bloom!”
Occasionally popular nineteenth-century American poets could wax melancholy about autumn, mourning it as a season of decay and loss. Both Celia Thanxter and William Cullen Bryant expressed this mood, but they seem to be following conventional English poetic themes, not quite putting their hearts into their elegiac words. In “Third of November” Bryant was far from bleak of spirit:
Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson
..........................................................................
Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing
With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.
In “Evangeline,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow hailed autumn as “that beautiful season, the summer of All-Saints.” Another popular American poet of the last century, Helen Hunt, wrote in “Asters and Golden Rod”:
The lands are lit
With all the autumn blaze of Golden Rod
And everywhere the purple asters nod
And bend and wave and flint.
The differences between the poetry, autumn has inspired in Great Britain and in America are not the product of differences in national character. They are founded; I believe, on scientific reality----a matter of latitude and the earth’s tilt.
Summing up the story, differences in the thoughts and attitudes of two great nations towards autumn are very clear through this poetic comparison. That means English autumn is totally different than American autumn, so gardening practices in autumn must be different in these regions. Here England represented the temperate regions while Unite States represented tropical regions of the world.
Source : The Garden in Autumn by Allen Lacy; pp:19-22.
Summing up the story, differences in the thoughts and attitudes of two great nations towards autumn are very clear through this poetic comparison. That means English autumn is totally different than American autumn, so gardening practices in autumn must be different in these regions. Here England represented the temperate regions while Unite States represented tropical regions of the world.
Source : The Garden in Autumn by Allen Lacy; pp:19-22.
