Step out of your comfort zone when it comes to plants in your garden

Photo: Sigie Kendrick

Andropogon gerardii (Holy Smoke) is a magnificent fast-growing grass that can serve as a screen or hedge as it reaches six or more feet.

First, thank you to everyone who came out this past Saturday to support the Okanagan Xeriscape Association at its third fall plant sale.

It was a sparkling, sunny fall day and the sale was a great success.

Autumn is actually the ideal time to plant anything except annuals and most of your edibles. The ambient air temperature has cooled, so your plants transpire less and the soil is still warm so it’s perfect for root establishment.

Your plants will actually keep growing where planted until the ground freezes. Then they will go into dormancy for the winter and emerge in the spring ready to cope with another heat dome or whatever comes next, due to our increasingly-erratic climate.

Each fall, while espousing the benefits of planting at this time, I am met with skeptical gardeners, many from the Prairie provinces, who can’t embrace the whole idea. The climate in the Okanagan Valley is different from northern Saskatchewan and as such, gardeners must learn, adapt and be flexible.

It might be safe to say we humans like our habits, whether that involves what we pack for lunch, a favourite shoe store or those “go to” plant choices. I can get on board with a favourite shoe store, but why not step out of your comfort zone when it comes to making new plant choices? That’s particularly true if you’re in a new region with different growing conditions.

Autumn is also the time for ornamental grasses to shine, yet why are we still over-planting Calamagrostis x acutiflora (Karl Foerster Feather Reed Grass.) It was the first ornamental grass to be awarded the Perennial Plant of the Year Award in 2001, but has been so overused I heard a colleague recently refer to it as “gas station grass.” I immediately knew what she meant. It is plantinged in front of your neighbourhood gas station.

Today, there are so many more interesting grasses available and we should be stepping out of our comfort zones and trying some of the new ones. One I sourced for the plant sale, Schizachyrium scorparium (Standing Ovation) was the second ornamental grass to be named Perennial Plant of the Year in 2022.

Standing Ovation is a cultivar of our native Little Bluestem grass, a tough clumping grass dominant on the North American prairies. This warm-season grass performs even in poor, infertile dry soil. The spiky, green-blue grass blades transition to red and finally deep purple as the season winds down, with upright seed heads that persist through winter, offering visual interest and seeds for birds.

It reaches four feet in height, with half that in width and is an absolutely stunning addition to your mixed border, gravel or cottage garden.

Also snapped up at the sale was Andropogon gerardii (Holy Smoke), a magnificent fast-growing grass that can serve as a screen or hedge as it reaches six or more feet high. This North American grass is native to much of the central plains and is known commonly as “Big Bluestem” or “Turkey” grass.

Flowering stems rise above the foliage in late summer with three-parted purple blooms resembling turkey feet, hence one of its common names. The foliage of Holy Smoke starts out silvery and progresses to shades of stunning red and purple with seed heads which are enjoyed through the winter by songbirds.

Recently planted in the Grass Garden at the OXA demonstration garden is Muhlenbergia reverchonii, (Ruby Muhly grass), a diminutive warm season bunch grass that features clouds of pinky–red flowers in the fall. I’ll let you know how the trial goes, in a future column.

Visit our website at www.okanaganxeriscape.org and peruse our plant database for more suggestions for different ornamental grasses which are drought-tolerant while also being supportive of wildlife.

Remember, you as the consumer can influence your local nursery. So, if you have researched a grass that you would like to plant but it isn’t currently available, ask for it.

Step out of your comfort zone and plant a grass your neighbour doesn’t have. Your garden might end up being the envy of the block.

Make water work

As in years past, the Make Water Work challenge encourages homeowners to take the pledge to make water work smarter on their landscapes. By heading to the website at www.makewaterwork.ca and pledging, for instance, to choose plants suitable to our dry environment you will become eligible to win one of two prizes of $500.

This pledge encourages you to make better choices about your water consumption, so there will be enough water for firefighting, aquatic health and agriculture in our valley.

The Okanagan Xeriscape Association is grateful for the ongoing financial support of the Okanagan Basin Water Board and is proud to be collaborating on the Make Water Work campaign.

Sigrie Kendrick is a master gardener and executive-director of the non-profit Okanagan Xeriscape Association.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.