The workshop will consist of both a classroom session and an outdoor tour of the garden highlighting the different ways of employing ornamental grasses as an integral part of a modern garden landscape. Each will be approximately 1½ hours in duration.
During the classroom session, the emphasis will be on the aesthetics of gardening with ornamental grasses. The versatility of grasses will be explored with sections on mass plantings, statement specimens, integration in perennial borders and the use in containers will all be covered. The development of the new demonstration ornamental grass garden at HCP and the instructor’s home garden will be used extensively to illustrate these concepts.
The second part of the classroom session will explore the ever-expanding palate of available grasses to work with. As well as native species there will also be an in-depth review of the most popular exotic grass varieties for our area with an emphasis on the newest cultivars. Finally, there will be an introduction to some of the more interesting new species and cultivars that are becoming available locally.
The outdoor session will consist of a tour of the newly developing demonstration grass garden followed by a tour of the rest of the garden to illustrate more well-established areas where grasses have been used to best effect.
$40 HCP Members /$50 Non-Members
Register ONLINE or call 250 479 6162
Instructor Bio
Mike Rogers – “The Grass Man”
As a keen gardener, when Mike arrived in Victoria from Calgary a few years back, he felt like a kid in a candy shop and enjoys trying to grow anything that will thrive in our balmy Westcoast climate. When he moved into his current house on Craigflower Road in 2018, he quickly discovered that, located as he was between the golf course and the Esquimalt Gorge Park, the unfenced front garden was a deer “super-highway”. Consequently he began to look out for truly deer resistant plants to populate his garden. One group of plants that fit the bill was ornamental grasses and so has evolved a love affair with these wonderful plants.
Mike’s adventures with ornamental grasses evolved into a series of articles in the Victoria Horticultural Society magazine Gardenry and that led to a number of speaking engagements – one of which gave rise to the moniker “The Grass Man” which he rather enjoys! Research for these articles and talks has resulted in the discovery of an ever expanding plethora of wonderful grasses and so the adventures continue.
