Eskdale Poa labillardieri ‘Eskdale’ on The Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #16
Eskdale Poa labillardieri ‘Eskdale‘ on The Bluedale Plants Online Show, Episode #16
This week we’re going to be looking at a cool season grass. In the past weeks I’ve been talking about warm season grasses and how they can actually be used and now I’m going to have a look at a cool season grass called Poa Eskadale.
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Now Poa Eskdale is a grass that gets to about 70cm tall, it has green to slightly blue-ish green foliage. Being a cool season grass you’re going to get beautiful colour in the foliage in Autumn, Winter and Spring.
You will see a dormant phase through the heat of Summer where you’ll get a bit if straw coloration in the plant. Interestingly though, over the Summer when the plant itself is dormant it’s actually flowering so the fact that you’ve got flowers over the Summer months when the foliage isn’t as lush as the cooler parts of the year you’ve still got an interesting display of foliage and flowers combined which bring interest to the garden.
Poa Eskdale can be used in a variety of ways. It’s very good mass planted and that’s where we see many leading landscape architects plant it on mass. Because it does flower and the flowers get to about 1 meter or a bit over 1.2 meters tall it picks up any slight breeze. So you get this movement in the garden and it really brings a lot of dramatics to the landscape.
So it can be used mass planted, you can plant it as specimen plantings as well or along the edge of a border where it actually forms an edge to a garden. I’ve seen it used in that application. Generally mass planting seems to be the preferred way for most designers and a lot of home gardeners follow the trends that these leading designers are actually promoting and so that’s a good way to use it. Filling up areas in a garden, planting underneath trees, on the edge of pathways and driveways, it works really well in those applications.
Poa Eskdale is going to do really well in your in land cooler climates. It handles frost really well. It won’t discolour the foliage under frost. It will even grow right up in to the snow fields where it can be covered in snow for part of the year and that’s where you often see it naturally occurring.
In coastal gardens it’s still going to do really well for you although as you move in to a hotter climate you’re going to see a little bit more dormant phase in the plant with a bit more straw colouration. So if you think about Queensland, you might see straw colouration from about November through to February. Move that in to Sydney and Melbourne, you’re not going to see that for the same length of time. You’re going to see more lush growth because you’ve got a cooler more temperate climate.
Poa Eskdale is opposite to a lot of the warm season grasses that we’ve talked about where you cut them coming out of winter. With Poa Eskdale you actually cut it at the end of Summer early Autumn. Reduce the plant down by about half or 2 thirds of the foliage. It allows the plant to reshoot away as it actively grows in the cooler months and you get a lush growth emerging at that particular time. Also a good time to fertilise, give it a good drink to help get the fertiliser in and also help promote the lush growth.
Poa Eskdale e we have as both a 140mm pot and a Viro-Tube 10 Pack. So as I mentioned a lot of people are using it in mass plantings so the Viro-Tube 10 Pack is an ideal way to buy Poa Eskdale if that’s what you want to do. If you’re looking for more specimen planting or you just want to have a few less than the 10 then buying individual 140 mm pots is the ideal way to go.
For more information or to buy Poa Eskdale click here…
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