Movement, texture, and sound, the things flowers cannot give. Ornamental grasses and hardy bamboos catch the low light, sway with the least breeze, and hold the eye through winter when little else does, the quiet structural backbone of a planting.
Among ornamental grasses, Chasmanthium latifolium is the rare one that thrives in shade. River oats, also called northern sea oats and inland sea oats, is a clumping, rhizomatous perennial grass of the eastern and central United States, found in the wild along wooded creek banks, river bottoms, and shaded slopes from Pennsylvania south to Florida and west toward the prairies. The broad, bamboo-like blades are wider than most grasses can claim, and the plant carries them in a loose, arching mound that takes deep shade without sulking.
Carex flaccosperma, the blue wood sedge, is a clump-forming native of the Southeastern woodlands grown for cool, glaucous, blue to blue-green foliage. The blades are wide for a sedge, to half an inch, faintly quilted along the veins, and they catch the light with a soft powdery sheen that lifts a shaded planting where most greens recede.
Few native grasses put on a show like Muhlenbergia capillaris. For most of the year pink muhly is a modest, upright tuft of fine, wiry, dark green blades, easy to overlook. Then, in the shortening days of autumn, the whole clump erupts into a haze of tiny flowers, an airy cloud of pink to rose-red that seems to hover a foot above the foliage and glows when backlit by low sun. Massed in a drift, the effect is one of the most spectacular in the fall garden.
Muhly grass is a distinctive ornamental, a wiry upright bunch grass that spends most of the year as an unremarkable tuft of narrow foliage and then, in late summer and fall, throws up a haze of flowering panicles so fine and so numerous that the whole plant appears to be smoking. The normal form does this in reddish pink. 'White Cloud' is a rare selection that does it in white, and the effect is entirely different: cooler, more luminous, and startling when backlit by a low sun. Plumes reach three to four feet. Set against a dark background, an evergreen hedge or a stand of pine, the white reads as light rather than as color, and mixed among the ordinary pink form the two together are better than either alone.
Muhlenbergia dumosa, bamboo muhly, is a desert-born grass with the grace of bamboo, drifting like cloud shadow across the canyon floor. From the arid uplands and rocky washes of northern Mexico and southern Arizona, where sun-scorched cliffs and canyon walls shaped the character of the species, bamboo muhly evolved to thrive on dry air and lean soils, and yet carries the fluid elegance of true bamboo, swaying at the faintest breeze.
Pleioblastus distichus 'Mini' is the smallest of the running bamboos, a fine-textured dwarf that behaves more like a groundcover than a grove. The tiny, glossy leaves line up in flat, two-ranked sprays, fern-like and neat, on threadlike stems only eight or ten inches high, building a dense green carpet that can be mowed or edged like a lawn.
Palm grass earns the name at a glance. The broad, pleated blades of Setaria palmifolia fold and arch like the fronds of a young palm, bringing a lush, tropical boldness to a border that most grasses cannot match. This is a plant grown for presence and texture rather than flower, a bright green statement in beds, containers, and the wilder corners of a garden where form is welcome.
Shibataea kumasaca is the most civilized of bamboos, a low, dense, evergreen kind grown for tidy structure rather than height. The short, broad, oval leaves are unusual for a bamboo, closer to the foliage of ruscus or a small shrub than to the fine blades most bamboos wear, which is why the plant goes by ruscus-leaf bamboo. Growing to about four or five feet, the canes zigzag gently from node to node, giving a second common name, zig-zag bamboo.
