Over Thanksgiving Karen and I trekked to North Carolina, and during our short stay, we found time to swing by the North Carolina Museum of Art museum to see how the grass plantings had matured since the installation.
The vegetation in the park is an artistic rendering of the North Carolina countryside, and it continued the theme of a piedmont prairie that is used throughout the park from surrounding artwork to use in green infrastructure. The website says that 150,000 plants were used in the gardens.
The grouping of plants was an excellent example of blocking with a heavy focus on grasses. As a grass groupie, I loved it. It was very peaceful and tranquil. In some sections with the elevated mounds and tall grasses I felt separated from the outside world. I'll let the photos do the rest of the talking.
This photograph is a before shot from our visit in December 2016. While I'm not sure of the exact date of planting, my guess is sometime in 2016 based on the small size of the propagules.
And, this picture is from our most recent trip. Grasses galore! You can make out the ribbonesque block plantings in this image that created a dynamic flow over the landscape. The lines of plugs have faded away after a year of growth.
The juxtaposition of the wild grass with the tame was a legible contrast scattered throughout the park.
Color echo between the wood (what appears to be some type of Carya, I didn't get close enough to look) and the forb (Amsonia hubrichtii).
Sporobolus heterolepis skirts the Yucca and really makes it pop better than if it were surrounded with bark mulch.
Not everything had filled in yet. This river of Amsonia needs a few more years to go from a trickle to a current. Also, the gray twigs on the left were from Pervoskia. I wonder how it looks in the growing season as usually this species performs marginally for us in the southeast.
I liked the use of Eryngium in the planting, but I left feeling like Christopher Walken wanting more cowbell. I could've used a little more rattle(snake master). I gotta have more rattle!!!
Some artsy-fartsy shots. Panciles of Muhlenbergia lindheimeri against an amber sunset.
The curls of a fading Amsonia hubrichtii