Deschampsia cespitosa Pixie Fountain

Deschampsia cespitosa 'Pixie Fountain' is a small, variegated variety, with beautiful purple-silver flowers at the end of the season. This pretty perennial and evergreen grass forms a beautiful fountain of long and fine silver-green leaves, from which beautiful changing flowers emerge and fade beautifully. With its beautiful winter silhouette adorned with stalks and faded flowers, this grass is decorative all year round. This plant looks stunning in a contemporary setting, a wild garden, or planted in a pot on the terrace.

Deschampsia cespitosa is a densely tufted perennial, non-spreading grass, belonging to the poaceae family. It is native to Europe, temperate Asia, and boreal America, where it grows easily in various moist, uncultivated places. This extremely hardy, long-lived plant self-seeds quite easily, but the young seedlings will be easily eliminated.

The 'Pixie Fountain' cultivar forms a small upright clump 60 cm (24in) tall when in flower (40cm (16in) for the foliage), with a spread of 40 to cm. The silver-green evergreen leaves are flat, 2 to 5 mm (1in) wide, very rough, and often very long. Large inflorescences appear in the midst of the foliage from July to September in wide and fluffy spikes, borne by stiff stalks. They are formed of numerous small flowers initially silver-green, then turning more yellow-purple before becoming golden. These flowers become increasingly bright as the days go by.

Few scenes equal the almost unreal spectacle of an autumn sun flooding the mass of golden tufts. A fascinating and poetic tableau, easy to reproduce in our gardens because this very hardy plant is happy in any ordinary moist soil, even heavy clay. Deschampsia does not disturb neighbouring plantings and thrives at the edge of ponds. In a mass planting this grass will give its best, mixed with perennials with ample foliage such as Darmera or Ligularia, or even planted in large masses, to bring lightness and brightness to a wild garden. It will happily accompany daffodils, jonquils, and many late-season perennials (sneezeweed, echinacea, Japanese anemones, asters). It also grows well in a pot. Finally, its long inflorescences lighten fresh or dried bouquets.