25 Best Ornamental Grass Garden Layout For Outdoor Space

Creating an ornamental grass garden layout is a great way to boost your outdoor living space. Not only do ornamental grasses provide a natural and tranquil atmosphere, but they are also low maintenance and can create a stunning and unique garden layout. With the right design, you can create a striking and inviting outdoor area that will be the envy of all your neighbors. 

This article will discuss ornamental grass garden design fundamentals and how to choose suitable grasses for your space.

From selecting the best layout to the proper planting and care instructions, you can create a beautiful garden of ornamental grasses that will bring your landscape to life.

What Is Ornamental Grass?

Ornamental grass is a type of grass that is planted primarily for decorative reasons. It is usually tall, narrow, and clump-forming and can add texture and movement to gardens. Some varieties are evergreen, while others are deciduous. They can be used to create privacy screens, provide wildlife shelter, and provide an attractive backdrop for flowers.

Ornamental grass is usually used in landscaping. Ornamental grasses add texture to gardens and landscapes, creating movement and interest with their delicate foliage and flowers. They require little maintenance and can provide year-round color, texture, and structure. 

What Time Of Year Do You Plant Ornamental Grasses?

The best time to plant ornamental grasses is in the spring or fall. Planting in the spring gives the grasses a longer growing season to establish a robust root system before winter. Meanwhile, planting in the fall will allow the grasses to start developing in the spring.

The benefit of planting in the spring is that it gives the plants enough time to establish a robust root system before winter. Fall planting is frequently more dependable with certain additional safeguards, especially in early or harsh winters.

Where Is The Best Place To Plant Ornamental Grass?

The best place to plant ornamental grass is in a sunny area with well-draining soil. Choosing a location that won’t be shaded by trees or buildings is essential to ensure the grass gets enough sun.

Ornamental grass can also be planted in containers if they are large enough and have good drainage.

The majority of ornamental grasses require full sun and well-drained soil. Drought tolerance is a trait of established grasses that love the sun. Raised beds will help to ensure proper drainage when they are planted there. Most grasses can be grown in regular garden soil.

Simple Ornamental Grass Garden Layout

A simple layout is often the best approach when creating a garden of ornamental grasses that are both easy to maintain and visually stunning.

By using a few key elements and principles of design, it is possible to create a cohesive and beautiful garden that will add a unique texture and movement to a landscape. With careful planning and a selection of varieties, a simple ornamental grass garden layout can be a great addition to any yard.

1. Privacy Hedge Ornamental Grass Garden Design

It will be much more attractive to have flowing grasses surrounding your outside space rather than a dull fence! Consider growing an ornamental grass hedge instead of a conventional hedge or wooden wall to offer natural privacy to your front yard or backyard.

Choose full and tall grasses, then plant them with precise spacing. The grass clumps will grow together as they develop to form a barrier. Feather reed grass or maiden grass are a few excellent choices.

2. Simple Ornamental Grass with Unique Sound

Many ornamental types of grass are not only beautiful landscape designs but also to be heard. You can feel calm and unwind in your simple garden by listening to the rustling, rattling noises of the grass in the breeze.

While most decorative grasses can rustle in the wind, keep an eye out for grasses that will flutter at the first sign of trouble, including zebra grass or purple moor grass. Just imagine yourself lounging on a hammock while serenading by wind chimes and whispering grasses!

3. Ornamental Grass To Lush Groundcover

Simple and low-maintenance yard landscaping covers a steep slope or other difficult-to-reach areas in your garden with ornamental grasses. Choose non-invasive spreading species like little bluestem, prairie dropseed, or blue grama grass.

These grass plants require little upkeep once established and provide beauty to bare areas. You might even mass-plant low-growing ornamental grasses to take the place of your lawn or a portion of it.

4. Native Grasses Garden

This is one of the most beneficial landscaping ideas for your garden and environment. In fact, native grasses offer crucial habitats for wildlife. With this idea, you can still grow decorative grasses if you don’t have a meadow of wildflowers. Birds, insects, and other creatures can find food, shelter, and nesting materials in these perennial grasses. Depending on your region, you might decide on golden sedge or tufted hair grass.

5. Mixed Ornamental Grass in The Container

Consider choosing this idea if you want to create a simple but attractive landscape design with ornamental grasses. To add dramatic vertical appeal, plant a single clump of grass in a big pot. Even better, you can create a pot of mixed grasses and sedges with various heights, forms, textures, and hues. Choose spectacular grasses like Japanese blood grass, fiber optic grass, or red rooster carex to make an impression.

6. Fairytale Prairie Garden

Bring the fairy-tale atmosphere to your garden by creating a pretty prairie in your backyard! This concept is ideal for those who have a large backyard. To make this idea, consider choosing wildflowers with pastel colors such as pink, white, and purple.

These exceptionally hardy plants offer abundant natural beauty with little upkeep. In addition, they require less maintenance and are better for the environment than a lawn.

7. Formal Flair Garden

Suppose you want to create a luxurious garden design; how about making a stunning focal point with ornamental grasses? The combination of big bluestem and feather reed grass has a remarkably erect structure ideal for accentuating a formal theme. To have the most impact, we recommend you plant them in pairs. While landscaping with grasses, you can also add colorful flowers around.

8. Ornamental Grass and Hydrangea Bed Garden

When it comes to a gorgeous ornamental grass layout, you can’t go wrong with this idea. Create an excellent line of ornamental grasses to border your beds and flowerbeds. The most outstanding options for this are compact varieties like blue fescue. In addition, you can combine with hydrangea along the beds to give more volume and texture.

9. Plant A Knot Garden

A simple but pretty ornamental grass garden idea, mixing ornamental grasses and evergreens, would be fantastic. While geometric knot gardens are most frequently made with orderly evergreens and herbs planted as low hedges, smaller grasses may make the hedge plants and the grass stand out more.

Let a golden sedge, which isn’t actually a grass but has a similar appearance, stand out strikingly against the dark boxwood.

10. Ornamental Grass Garden Design Near Swimming Pool

This easy landscape with ornamental grass adds a natural vibe to your swimming pool. Ornamental grasses may soften the appearance of walls, asphalt, and other hardscapes to prevent them from looking chilly and unwelcoming.

Use the mass of maiden grass, for instance, to soften the concrete edge of a swimming pool. You can have a neat edge to a pool deck created by a vast bed of mixed grasses that screens a nearby yard.

11. Elegant Textured Grass Garden

While planting a large group of ornamental grasses, consider its texture composition. Simply arrange different sizes of ornamental grasses in your large backyard. Look how the terrain is given a distinctive texture by ornamental grasses.

Like fountain grass, plants with a firmer texture are balanced with soft, mounding grasses like these. You can add switchgrass and other upright grasses to provide the ideal textural contrast to more mounded plants.

12. Blue and White Grass Garden Design

If blue and white are your preferred color scheme, simply plant this mixture of Meteor Shower verbena and the Playin’ the Blues combination. Imagine both varieties lining your driveway or extending down your fence. A breathtaking view for very little work! Its blossoms have a mysteriously magnetic quality. You’ll almost always see bees or butterflies feeding there when you pass by.

Creative Ornamental Grass Garden Layout

Creating an ornamental grass garden design can be a fun and creative way to add a unique touch to any outdoor space. With the proper ornamental grass garden layout, you can create an eye-catching space that brings beauty and texture to your yard.

By combining different varieties of grasses with other plants, trees, and shrubs, you can create a visually stunning garden that will add an element of interest to any landscape.

13. Complementary Ornamental Grass Garden Layout

If you want to do a garden makeover in your small backyard, we recommend you use a complementary technique. Ornamental grasses, while beautiful on their own, make a magnificent backdrop for vibrant flowers and other complimentary plants.

You can add river birch trees with pale, papery bark that contrasts nicely with the green grasses in terms of texture and color. Moreover, tall grasses like big bluestem might make a nice rear border behind shorter flowering plants.

14. Ornamental Grass In Terra-Cotta Containers

For those who don’t have enough ground to plant an ornamental grass garden don’t worry! This grass garden layout will be the answer. Many tiny kinds of grass are ideal for container gardening due to their range of sizes, colors, and shapes.

You can have a plain stone wall embellished with fiber optic grass in uncomplicated terra-cotta containers. The thick, succulent leaves of the gray-blue echeveria create a contrasting feel that enhances the image.

15. Glowing Winter Ornamental Grass Border

If you want to have an excellent theme landscape design before the winter season comes, try this creative idea. Select taller, middle-sized types to create wider borders around your yard.

Choose clump-forming grasses rather than spreading varieties, which will quickly overgrow their boundaries and smudge your neat lines. Plant Blue fescue, Japanese sedge, and blue-eyed grass since they are excellent border grasses.

16. Ornamental Grass Garden In Wildflower Meadow

When it comes to aesthetic grasses landscaping ideas, the combination with wildflower meadow is our favorite. Although grass sometimes serves as a “filler” for wildflower meadows, it also offers a crucial habitat and unique textures and colors. If you have or intend to create a wildflower meadow, think about mixing decorative grasses such as Switchgrass, Indian grass, and purple top among the vibrant blossoms.

17. Year-Round Front Yard Landscaping

Create a natural-style garden that stays year-round with our ornamental grass border idea. The beauty of an ornamental grass garden in every season is one of its many advantages.

As the early spring blooms fade, warm-season grasses proliferate, while cool-season types add a dash of green to a browning environment. Look for yellow foxtail grass, bottlebrush grass, or reed grass that stands out during growing and dormant seasons.

18. Ornamental Grass In Vegetable Garden

Your vegetable garden may look dull because of a lack of color and texture. If you want to light your garden up, ornamental grass is the answer! Ornamental grasses not only enhance your environment’s beauty but can also help spice up your veggie garden. For example, the eggplants’ deep purples can contrast nicely with the buff feather reed grass plumes.

19. Voluminous Grasses Garden

Although this garden layout looks massive and powerful, it uses low-maintenance ornamental grasses. So, you can still save your budget for an outstanding garden design.

Choose dense grasses like miscanthus or heavy switchgrass like Panicum virgatum’ Shenandoah’ for beds to create a voluminous garden that can be seen from a distance. Additionally, utilizing light-textured grasses like tufted hair grass might achieve a transparent appearance.

20. Fall Grass Hedge Garden

At the end of the season, when the majority of annuals and perennials appear exhausted, grasses really sparkle. Many types of grass provide two distinct points of interest: magnificent fall color and lovely seed heads. Therefore, create an ornamental grass garden to celebrate the fall season. Combine grasses with the most vibrant fall foliage, including switchgrass and little bluestem.

21. Blue Fescue Ornamental Grass Garden Layout

Suppose you want to bring the “blue” vibe and the chilly fall season to your garden; why don’t you create this Blue Fescue garden? Blue Fescue is an easy-to-grow grass that will add texture and color to your garden. Although numerous options are available, “Beyond Blue” and “Elijah Blue” are among our favorites because they offer the deepest shades. Additionally, they grow the prettiest blooms, which are ideal for spicing up your garden.

22. Ornamental Grass Garden Art

Bring your sense of creativity and art to your ornamental grass garden layout. Your preferred decorative grasses can go perfectly with sculptures and other garden art. Add sculptures made of broken pottery to provide a fascinating contrast with feather grass.

The outcome is a stylish, modern design that will last all year. You can also try various plant and art combinations until you find the perfect arrangement that you can never get enough of.

23. Fluffy Purple Fountain Grass Garden

Combining annual purple fountain grass with cleome will give your landscape a vibrant purple pop that lasts through fall. We interplanted types that reach similar heights here to create a tapestry of spherical flower clusters and fluffy fox tail plumes.

Choose Senorita Blanca cleome for a more layered appearance, with the cleome planted in front and the grass behind it. Both plants are incredibly heat tolerant and will flourish in full sun with average water.

24. Cool Palettes Garden

In hot areas, cool color schemes are a welcome sight. The incredible blue spires of the Blues salvia are matched with the fresh green and white striped “Sky Rocket” annual fountain grass.

The traditional combination of blue, green, and white is interplanted to make the hues contrast. From the moment you plant, you’ll have blue flowers, and from the middle of summer to the end of the growing season, foxtail plumes will join the show.

25. Vibrant Massive Grass Garden

This is a creative and reasonably priced option if you want to quickly fill a vast space. Combining Supertunia Vista petunias and Vertigo fountain grass is ideal since they both need whole light and medium moisture. Vertigo is a very robust ornamental grass that may grow from up to 8 feet tall and about the same width in just one season.

Meanwhile, petunias from the Supertunia Vista variety are just as aggressive, growing from 3 to 4 feet in vibrant colors. They can comfortably share the landscape with Vertigo without being absorbed by it.

Final Thought

When creating a landscape design with ornamental grasses, it is essential to consider how the plants will fit into the overall aesthetic of the garden. With the proper ornamental grass garden layout, you can create a stunning, natural-looking garden that adds texture and interest to your outdoor space.

As you plan, experiment with different combinations of grasses to create a unique garden that expresses your personal style and brings joy to your outdoor living area.

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FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

How do you arrange ornamental grasses?

When arranging ornamental grasses, choose a spot that receives at least six hours of sun per day. Then, dig a hole twice as wide and slightly more profound than the pot in which the ornamental grass grows.

Place the plant in the hole and backfill the hole with soil. Firm the soil around the plant and water it thoroughly. Finally, arrange the ornamental grasses in a group or line with other plants, depending on the desired look.

How fast does ornamental grass spread?

The speed of ornamental grass spread can vary greatly depending on the type of grass, its environment, and the care it receives. Some ornamental grasses can spread rapidly, while others stay relatively small and spread slowly.

Generally, ornamental grasses spread more quickly in warmer climates and with plenty of water and fertilizer. But most ornamental grasses spread at a moderate rate of 6-12 inches per year.

Are ornamental grasses high maintenance?

No, ornamental grasses are generally low maintenance and are easy to care for. They are drought-tolerant and can often be left with little attention for months. Some species of ornamental grass may require more frequent watering or trimming, but overall they require minimal care and attention.

Does ornamental grass like sun or shade?

Ornamental grasses generally best in full sun, although some will tolerate partial shade. Sun provides the necessary energy for the grass to grow and thrive, while shade can cause the foliage to become thinner and weaker. The amount of sun and shade an ornamental grass needs will vary depending on the species.

Can you plant ornamental grasses together?

Yes, ornamental grasses can be planted together as long as they have similar growing requirements. Make sure to provide each grass with adequate space and sunlight and choose varieties that will thrive in the same soil and climate.

This is beneficial because ornamental grasses look better when planted in groups. Grouping grasses together also helps create a fuller, more lush look in the landscape, provides protection from the wind, and helps reduce erosion.