Thanks. I found a positive ID at the web link below. Here is a link that might be useful: Plants of the Primrose Family

I want to say they are all Miscanthus sinensis cultivars, because of the look of the flower heads. The first one may be 'Yaku Jima.' The second one stumps me because of the striping of the medium-width foliage. The third one is one of the wide-bladed varieties. Maybe 'Malepartus' and maybe 'Silberfeder.' It isn't very happy looking, with sparse foliage and burned blade ends.

Hi all, I don't know why the Penstemon link isn't working on the main page, but if you go to the Roadsides and Ditches link on the top of the page, and then click on the P. eatonii on the right side, it'll work! David, I love to look at the flowers (and tree bark, and rocks, and moss, and clouds....) whenever I'm out hiking too. When I'm on vacation, I'm always bugging the Park Rangers for the botanical names of the things I've seen! (And they're usually pretty good at giving me an answer!) Steve and Digit! GW not working properly! Is that possible??? I've been having intermittant problems with it for the last couple years--ever since Skip sold it to you-know-who! Oh, well! Most of the time it works! Gotta go for right now. Will try to come back for at least one post I wanna do tomorrow--before I leave town again! Skybird

here is my theory in respect to gardening. it is damn hard and downright disappointing for most people in a high mountain dessert. they get excited in spring and read all the better homes and garden mags and jump right in. six months later their yard looks like crap and it is a struggle to just keep the grass alive. i think people get discouraged that their yard does not look like martha stewart's. anyone can have a gorgeous garden with relatively minimal effort in the east and west coast, but in the rockies, it is more difficult to have the traditional new england yard. you really have to know you plants and get good with sprinklers and drip lines to have the same effect. then there is xerascaping or should i say zeroscaping. nine times out of ten the results are so poorly executed that a vacancant lot looks better. i really hate it when people rip out their yards and replace it with a few rocks, black plastic showing through an inch of bark and a yucca. sorry that is not anithing ending in "scaping". water-wise and poor taste are not synonyms. they get discouraged and abandon it because it does not look like red butte gardens. the effect is even worse since they don't "have" to do anything to keep that single yucca alive. my yard is nothing t right home about, but i try and derive great satisfaction in working in it, but it is a constant disapointment when compared to my vision of an english cottage garden. my good friend is a landscaper and he says utahs are just cheep when it come to landscape. we put $5k into landscaping a $300k house. he claims californians will allocate a quarter of the budget to the landscape�"an exaggeration i think, but there is probably some truth as well. for a good portion of the year, it is just not that pleasant to be outside here (compared to say california). people don't use their yards as an extension of their houses as much. and don't value it as living space. my neighborhood is somewhat unique in that there are a great deal of beautiful yards and a good deal are maintained by the owners. about a quarter have water features. my neighbor keeps bees. we share produce, plants and seeds. it is a very house proud neighborhood. most people don't have boats and atvs, we have projects. we talk about our remodeling projects more than anything else. we are different, but that is why i live here�"i fit in. here is a novel idea. rather than complaining about lacking people on the forum, lets recruit some participants. we all have friends that we talk about gardening with outside of this forum. invite them. the lack of participation i believe largely due to the fact that people don't know it is here. if everybody brought one person the forum would double exponentially. tell the guy at the nursery, your grandpa, they guy at the farmers market, etc. when ever you are talking about gardeing stuff, invite the person to log in. i wish somebody would have told me. i found it by accident. i have made about 20 posts to garden web forums in the past week. i am sure i will settle down when the novelty of all the information and like minds wears off, but i am in for the long haul. i am sure there are thousands more like me who just don't know. don't think any state-wide attitudes will change, but we will at least have good a forum of good company.