Muhlenbergia capillaris 'White Cloud'

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.

This selection came from near Jacksonville, Florida, and was introduced by our friends at Superior Trees. Muhlenbergia honors Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Muhlenberg, the Pennsylvania Lutheran minister who became one of early America's most serious botanists, and capillaris means hair-like, for the impossibly fine flowering branches. The species is native across the southeastern United States, at home on poor sandy ground, roadside cuts, and pine flatwoods where richer soil would simply produce a floppier plant.

The genus carries one of the most important craft traditions in the American South. Along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, Gullah Geechee basketmakers, descendants of enslaved West Africans who carried coiled basketry techniques across the Atlantic, have worked sweetgrass into baskets for more than three centuries. A note of precision that our older catalogs missed: the grass the basketmakers call hard grass, the sweetgrass itself, is Muhlenbergia sericea, a close coastal relative that spent years classified as a variety of M. capillaris and is still sold under that name in places. Weavers distinguish carefully between the two. This plant is the soft grass of the pair, an ornamental rather than a basket material, but the kinship is real and worth knowing.

Full sun and lean, sharply drained soil. This is a plant that fails from kindness: rich ground and generous irrigation produce a lax, floppy clump that falls open in the first heavy rain, while poor dry sand produces the upright wiry habit and the dense flowering the grass is grown for. Warm-season, so growth starts late in spring; do not assume a bare crown in April has died. Cut the whole clump back to a few inches in late winter, before new growth begins, and leave the spent plumes standing through the cold months, where they hold frost beautifully. Excellent massed, in a meadow planting, along a drive, or in a sunny border with Rudbeckia, Symphyotrichum, Liatris, and Amsonia hubrichtii. Deer ignore it and drought does not trouble it.