Sea Oats are great marginals or a decorative grass, spread quickly to cover unsightly objects, are salt tolerent for those in the East who live along roads that are treated with salt in the winter. Dried, they make nice addition to dried flower arrangement. Make me an offer. Water or land plants. I'm also trading garden flags in bright colors, any floral or garden scene you can imagine, also Holidays. Pick a theme, any theme, I have it Long lasting, weather proof, beautifully made. Also, long burning, votives in little glass flowerpots in floral, fruit or food scents or potpourri.

Wow, thorough research, donn_. Thanks!!!! The bottom (Near the Wall) is sand with a mix of grass including American Beach Grass. Then you have bare sand and gravel with a scattering of Rugosa Rose, Crab Apple, and Eastern Red Ceder. Then you have a dense mix of Bayberry, Japanese Honeysuckle, poison ivy, and Eastern Red Cedar with a scattering of bare clay patches near the top. Useful to know that I should plant the Sea Oats in the clay spots. The possible catches are they hard to get to (because it is steep and because of the poison ivy) and the risk of reseeding into the lawn... My original concern was that I would plant Northern Sea Oats, it would outcompete and shade out the American Beach Grass, then the first time a big hurricane scattered salt spray all over the place the Northern Sea Oats would die off.

I have several clumps growing in a nursery bed which gets lots of water, and is partially shaded as well as protected from the prevailing wind. It's one of my wettest spots, and the Oats are doing just fine. I'd wait until spring. You don't have much warm weather left up there, and it's probably already gone to seed, and slowed or stopped it's growth. It may have enough energy left to get re-established, but why take the chance?

I am sorry that you took what I said as rudeness. I was stating that many grasses seed and are beautiful when they do but that is how they proliferate, and if one does not have the energy to deal with what that plant does naturally, maybe it is not a good match for how you want to live your life. Life is full of choices. I was not belittling you for not wanting to weed out copious seedlings. That is a choice. You also have the choice of getting a more reticent plant that fits better with your expectations. There are plants I fight and irradiate because they do their thing just too well. This is not one of them.Some grasses are more sterile and might be a better match for you. I DO have this grass, about a 70' bed of it along the north side of my shop that are going to seed right now. It grows in dry shade very well. My situation is not yours. I am in VERY dry upland alkaline limestone hills in Texas and things don't seed out as they do in a normal garden. I don't have a problem with out of controlled seedlings. I have heard that that is what it does in other situations. . Maybe a couple every year due too the fact that I dryland garden and do not irrigate.. We are MUCH dryer and hotter than you, and those seedlings just don't develop as they do when coddled in a rich garden. To answer your very basic question, I would say the best time to cut them back is before the seeds turn straw colored or collect all the seed before they start dropping in a bag if you want to live life more dangerously and have more of that time of beauty,.. I usually let them turn brown because I want the seed viable. The ones that drop thicken my bank and ensures continuance of my bed if a drought kills off my bank of grass as it did in 2011. If my bank does die off, I water the bed after the drought has broken and coddle it back to being. I also collect them by running my hand up the stalk and deseed them before they drop and then distribute them in my sometimes moist arroyo gorge where they are found naturally in my neck of the woods. They call this plant "inland SEA oats" maybe because it makes a SEA of oats. It is beautiful in mass which is how it wants to grow naturally . I have a large place so that is how I am letting it go.