Our garden calendars are rapidly racing toward a rather paradoxical date. Any time now people will start noticing the beauty of ornamental gasses in the landscape and since our natural tendency is to plant what we like when we like it, the urge to plant grasses will soar.

The problem is that many of the most popular ornamental grasses are what we call warm season plants and will establish better if planted in our warmest temperatures. Several years I took identical starter plants of a warm season grass. One went in April and the other in late May or early June.

By the end of the summer the later planted grass was much larger than the one planted earlier. I have also planted grasses well into the fall with success. Generally they waited till the following year to root in, so it took several stomps with my boot to compete with the natural heaving we get from our fluctuating temperatures in a typical winter season.

The warm season grasses include the large group of miscanthus, panicums, erianthus, and the increasingly popular native prairie grasses. The cool season ones include calamagrostis, pennisetum and blue fescue.

We'll take a few seconds to de-Latinize the last paragraph. The miscanthus are a large group with large, usually white, flower heads. You can find cultivars ranging from you knee to well over you head in size. Miscanthus have a wide variety of common names. Maiden grass, Japanese silver grass, zebra grass, and flame grass are some that quickly come to mind.

As I stated several weeks ago, miscanthus are on the invasive watch list. This year I got one seedling from maybe a dozen mature plants. Better than that, I even like the spot it picked, so it will stay.

Heavy metal, a steel blue grass, is the most popular panicum. They are dubbed frost grass. All tall grasses should be planted where they are backlighted. View the panicums against the sun on a frosty morning and you are in for a treat.

Erianthus is our climate's answer to pampas grass. The real pampas grass, cortaderia, is of questionable hardiness here. Hardy pampas grass is a 10-14 foot giant with a red cast to the foliage and huge white plumes.

There are a number of native prairie grasses joining the marketplace. These include the bluestems, Indian grass and dropseeds to name a few. They are being selected for foliage color and well deserve a place in the landscape.

The most widely planted grass is Calamagrostis "Karl Foerster" a well behaved tight clumping grass. Some new varieties are appearing.

Pennisetums are the ones with the fox tail plume. Generally they are smaller in stature. Unfortunately, the very popular red one is an annual here. Blue fescue is very short and very blue. Save this one for drier sites.

Grasses. If you are going to plant them, hurry. If you are going to enjoy them, sit back cause it won't end until snow or ice beats them down.