Whenever I design a vignette for my garden, I try to include an ornamental grass (or sedge). Grasses come in all heights and some are better behaved (not invasive) than others. I use many of the different low-growing grasses in the foreground and tall grasses in the background (usually up a slope where they catch the breeze and are backlit by the morning sun). Here are some of my combinations, but I'm in zone 7: I'm using carex testacea about 1x1, with itea virginica, a shrub. With that I've included aster frikarti moench for fall blooms. The orange in the testacea coordinates with the orange center in the blue aster. The itea blooms white sparklers with beautiful green leaves in the spring and is a vibrant red in the fall. All of that is backed by amsonia heubrichtiu, a perennial that is blue in the summer and blazing orange in the fall. So, with this combination (just planted in Oct 2006), I should get spring, summer and fall interest. Another favorite combination is carex evergold with the shrubby perennial, hypericum albury purple and groundcover golden creeping jenny lysimachia numularia beside my waterfall as shown here: I'm working on several vignettes for spring planting. The way I create these is that I pull photos (I'm a nursery retailer) of the plants that work in my zone and are deer resistant into my drawing program. I pull a shrub or tree and grass first. Then, I decide whether to add a perennial to the color scheme. I like to pull colors for the grass (like a yellow varigated) and combine that will a yellow flower or a flower with a yellow center. I like to contrast burgundy with gold or purple with orange. I use blue-grey foliage with hot pink blooms. There is an excellent little book that will give you simple and understandable instructions as well as inspiration. It is: Grasses: Versatile Partners for Uncommon Garden Design by Nancy J. Ondra, Saxon Holt (Photographer)

Have you seen "The Color Encyclopedia of Ornamental Grasses" by Rick Darke? It has a lot of nice photos and lots of info about ornamental grasses. There are lots of different miscanthus varieties, Darke says Gracillimus is one of the older ones and though beautiful, tends to flop. If you don't want to mix in shrubs with your grass hedge, you could mix Gracillimus (or another type of miscanthus) with different kinds of ornamental grasses, like feather reed grass (calamagrostis) or switch grass (panicum) for contrast in form and different flowering times. I've also found these two kinds of grasses easier to divide than miscanthus. Do you know what kind of butterfly bushes you have? In my zone, most butterfly bushes get taller than Gracillimus. Some plants I like in front of ornamental grasses are any daisy type flower [like purple coneflowers (echinacea), black eyed susans (rudbeckia), coreopsis, asters], catmints (nepeta)and calamints, Russian sage (perovskia), liatris, sedums, gaura, salvias and veronicas, daylilies and small spireas. These flowers are easy to care for and a lot of them attract butterflies too. Juliet

There are numerous 'clumping' ornamental grasses including 'Karl Foerster' feather reed grass that will slowly expand but aren't thugs (but yes, you are wise to do your research before you plant). The seeds of KF are sterile. Check out a good book on grasses at your library as well as sites such as Kemper Center for Home Gardening (www.mobot.org). In Zone 4 cool season grasses such as KF will make their presence known much earlier than the warm season grasses (although I still wouldn't be without miscanthus purpurascens or little bluestem). Variegated feather reed grasses include Overdam, Eldorado, and Avalanche (just added Avalanche this year). Karl Foerster is a real favorite in my garden, on my windy slope it adds some vertical punch with no staking worries, as well as movement, and is especially nice when the seedheads are backlit by the sun.

Less lawn to mow! Are the Pennesetum Setaceum in the ground? Just adding a late summer splash? In the future you might conside a sweep of Calamagrostis (Forester's Feather Reed Grass) between you and the next house over. Might make a good summer screen. Good work.