Bingo for blue grama! Using this and info from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower center, I am going to use part of the property to make a wildflower meadow using buffalo grass and blue grama mixed with native wildflower seeds. That should be pretty spectacular and nearly maintenance free once established! They also have info on using tall grasses. I think I'd like to make an area for some of them if I can figure out how to incorporate them into the landscape. This might be phase 3 or 4 or 5! I will have to check into vetiver. Once again - another type of grass I have never heard of! This has certainly been an eye opening experience. I had no idea there were so many types of grass - although it makes sense once you stop and think about it! Texas-weed - I want to do as little maintenance of grass as I can get away with. There will be a lot of it on 2 acres and I would much rather spend my time on the veggies and fruit trees. I have already been informed that I will get no help with anything green outdoors, so this middle-aged woman needs to plan carefully! I will probably buy a little tractor to help out, but I am intimidated at the thought of driving it. I'll have to get over that! But I do have a secret plan - invite men over when I need to drive it around! I suspect I will get a little help - at least the first year! On the plus side, my husband will do maintenance on the tractor. That sounds like fun to him - go figure! My current house does not have a blade of grass on it. I ran over my foot with a lawn mower when I was a kid and haven't gone near one since. I took the coward's way out and planted all shrubbery, ground covers, and gardens at the place where I have been living for the last 25 years. Time to grow up! Once again, thank you to everyone. I am amazed at how much my thinking has evolved in just a week. Cheers!

It sounds like your landscape architect did a great job of choosing low-maintenance perennials! But I agree, if you don't love the looks of something, definitely time to give it the boot. :) I think with the Karl Foerster and coneflower, maybe something low and yellow would look nice. What about some more coreopsis? Always great to repeat plants to give unity to the garden, and I think the yellow would be a nice compliment to the blooms of KF as well as the pink/purple of the coneflower. I will admit that I have at least seven varieties of coreopsis right now, so I'm obviously biased. :p Or maybe another smaller grass with a slightly different bloom than KF? Pennisetum Hameln might be nice if you have the room - they are a more rounded grass form, which would be a nice compliment to the spiky KF.

Thanks for the info about planting the warm season grasses. As far as the half completed lasagna bed, I pulled back some today and saw Worms!! This is good. So now I feel a little better about pulling this back, amending planting holes and then puting the lasagna compost back on the ground. It should continue the positive improvements I just saw. The NC area I live in, called the RTP area, is notorious for clay soil and land that does not perk. We live in a geological formation that has soil created from weathered sandstone and shale. The big "no no" around here is adding sand. It will make concrete here. They do say you can use washed "sharp sand". I am going to amend my planting holes with a lot of organic material, dig extra wide holes and elevate the plantings. I do not think I will be able to raise the entire area. I will incorporate some of the lasagna bed compost. I am also researching gravel to add to the planting holes. I have read some about 1/4 -10 gravel. This is a mix of 1/4 inch and .196 inch washed gravel with no fines. The fines being the very small particles that help make concrete with the clay soil. Seems like this is being used a lot in the Pacific Northeast. The gravel folks around here have never heard of this but they have something very similar called 78 gravel. I read an article by "Wind Dancer Garden" where they indicated they use this in all of their gardens to help soil drainage, I read on another web site where they even use this to plant lawn grass. My main problem now is getting this clay soil dry enough to work. Got all of my grasses and I am ready to plant! One other thing, the m. Graziella and m. Silberfeder I bought from Sooner Nursey seemed to have come in good shape. Nice size plants for 1 gallon containers. I have never purchased mail order plants before. I may have got lucky in ordering early and getting leftovers from last year before they got their regular stock in for the year. These may be larger plants than their normal 1 gallon plants.

Minimum spacing is 18", but if you put them closer together or to their neighbors, the police will not come and haul you away. You'll just have to deal with over-crowding sooner. If you plant 2, with 18" between them and the neighboring shrubs, you'll be left with 12" between the grasses...not enough. Within 2-3 years, they'll look like a jumble. Also, keep in mind the shrubs will be expanding their size and space, and the longer you allow a crowded situation to endure, the more you'll disturb the root systems of the shrubs when you move the grasses. I'd go with one KF, smack dab in the middle.