This new pink muhly grass, Muhlenbergia capillaris ‘Plumetastic’ was supposed to be quite showy, with fantastic billowing pink clouds of flowers in autumn. That’s what it shows in the photos, anyway. This would be the photos the nurseries use to promote the things, not my photos. Obviously, there’s quite a discrepancy with the foliage description too.
We got the plants at the end of June. Maybe this was too late in the year for planting with some hope of same year success. We didn’t have an earlier planting option, since these were evaluation plants given by a nursery. So in the ground they went. No time to lose, since most ornamental grasses don’t like to grow in pots. The idea was they’d grow, we’d be so impressed that we’d specify these and rave about them to everyone.
I’m more raging than raving. Not something that sells plants, alas.
– Mike
I even gave them a new name: “craptastic”.
Bad Stock?
Plants typically go into transplant shock for about two weeks, then emerge and start growing. Or die. These did neither, at least not right away. They looked about the same when planted on June 27th as a month later. Then they got worse. It’s hard to say if they’re really, truly dead since a few sad leaves stick out from the plants, but those could just be some carex from nearby.
Maybe they were already stressed. Maybe they were pining for the prairie. Maybe the nursery realized that these plants were just too moribund for sales and unloaded them on landscape professionals in the hopes we’d magically revive them and go on to rave about their beauty.
The Big Nada
They had an entire month to do something. Then three more. They could have grown some leaves, like warm season grasses are supposed to do. They could just outright die instantly, so we could call no joy and rip them out. No. They muddle on a perpetual vegetative zombie state, somewhere between death and life.
As far as beautiful purple-pink plumes of glowing cloud like beauty, not happening. At this point, I’d be ecstatic to see humble green leaves in profusion. Their growing season is here, but it seems they didn’t get the memo.
Instead of stars of the late summer meadow, the centerpiece of our Sac Open art show, it looks like we’ll have miserable clumps of sunbleached straw. Craptastic, not plumetastic.
What next?
We’ve given up on this species, and this variety along with it. We’re just their cup of climate.
We’ll see if we can find some Rose (not Pink) Muhly, Muhlenbergia reverchonii. Maybe it will thrive here. Or not. At least M. rigens, a California native, does very well here – but looks very little like M. capillaris or M. reverchonii.
We hoped they’d choose life, but instead they basically are slowly rotting away, becoming an insignificant amount of mulch to feed the pillbugs.