Shop Products
Houzz Logo Print
her8866

eager to know

her8866
18 years ago

I'm a postgraduate on ornamental grasses.I'm from China.Begin With my paper from this September I'm eager to know the research history of ornamental grasses in western country,especially on breeding for ornamental use.Because in my motherland,Ornamental grass is a new word,if not exactly.Most scholars research them as pasture now.And they are become to our eyes only from recent years.And as I know many ornamental grasses's origin is East Asia,what I'm eager to know is that so many species(cultivars) like Miscanthus sinensis 'Strictus' \¡®Cosmopolitan¡¯\etc have been widely used in your country while in my country they only be researched as Miscanthus sinensis,only as Genus or species,not cultivars.For my poor English,I respectly wish u experts give me some idea,eagerly,thanx!

Comment (1)

  • AgastacheMan
    18 years ago

    I only got one question out of that I hope, and that was the history of ornamental grasses in Western part of the world. I am a breeder of ornamental grasses and perennials, and I can say hybridizing grasses can be very rewarding, and as everything else, frustrating when production trials start. The exact word hybrid has given us many of the beautiful ornamental grasses that you see today, and if it wasn't for seed trials or crop crosses, you wouldn't see some of the newer varieites with vivid colors, plumes, shapely panicles, and a wide range of usages. Whenever you see a named cultivar in a grass, such as Schizachyrium scoparium "The Blues", it has been trialed, in this class from a batch of seedlings that produced the glaucous coloring and intense shifting of colors in autumn. Not a lot of people know that Schizachyrium scoparium, the parent, was a grass cultivated and raised for forage for cattle for early settlers, cattle ranches, and farms alike. The grass ranged widely throughout the Midwest prairies, but it wasn't until recently the need for an ornamental version of the plain genus specie. Many grasses were imported over from European settlers, and unfortunately many turned invasive, weedy, and troublesome for many of the native prarie grasses. If you want to go into the world of Miscanthus, you can see native Miscanthus specie in Japan, where fields of just plain jane Miscanthus sinensis var. condensatus grace the horizon along the coast with silver plume and yellow fall color. Or tracing Sugarcane, Saccharum officinarum, to China in early 150 b.c. or so, and now its cousins are being trialed and released in North America and Europe as ornamental worthies, like Saccharum arundinaceum ( Hardy Sugarcane ) that can give colors that can rivel Miscanthus in certian zones. In addition, there are more breeding programs going on, with some reulting to using the original specie to cross with some of the fertile cultivars to produce ornamental specimens worthy of finding a city garden or an country landscape.

Sponsored
KA Builders
Average rating: 5 out of 5 stars1 Review
Industry Leading General Contractors in Columbus
More Discussions