Designing Four-Season Grass Gardens: Beauty and Resilience

Designing Four-Season Grass Gardens: Beauty and Resilience

Learn how to design a sustainable, four-season garden with grasses and perennials.

Inspired by beautiful pictures of prairie gardens but lacking a large space to have massive sweeps of plants Susan Calhoun, Garden Designer, set out to make a grass garden. She soon discovered that one of the downfalls of grass gardens were that the season of interest was limited. The dormant period after the fall show lasted for many months. The idea of 4 season grass garden was born and the experimentation began.

The result was a garden that is interesting all year, from the first bulbs and evergreen grasses in early spring to the wheat-colored inflorescences providing food for birds in the winter. Additions of plants that like the same conditions, like echinacea, agapanthus, eremurus, and yarrow brought color interest along with the seasonal changes.

This type of garden can be any size, in almost any location, and have many combinations of colors and plants. The bio-diversity and sustainably of this type of immersive garden is amazing with very little water, no fertilizers and seasonal maintenance.

Join Susan as she shares the process, choices, tricks and maintenance of the All-season Grass Garden.

Susan Calhoun is a landscape designer with over 25 years of experience. She trained first at Seattle Community College, earning a degree in Horticulture, and then at Harlow Carr Botanical Garden in the UK. Many clients, successful designs, and published works later she became a writer for Fine Gardening Magazine.

Susan enjoys creating incredible gardens, learning and applying new innovations of design for her clients while continuing to share her work on Fine Gardening Magazine. Susan Calhoun—Plantswoman Design

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This In-Person $30/person and Zoom $20/person workshop will be held in the Foundation Library with limited seating. Please select your preferred type of participation during registration (Vista Gardens Members receive 50% off all workshops).

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