It’s Saturday. The end of the week. So, this wraps up my “dead” garden posts. This one is Zebra Pampas grass. It doesn’t look like a zebra now, but it gets its stripes in the depths of summer.

Shortly after we moved in, we bought three of these plants and had them along the deck to cover the exposed underside. They come in at about 8 to 9 feet tall by the end of each growing season. And their fall plumes sometimes add another foot.

After the deck was torn down a few years later, the grass had to be moved. What a miserable task that was to dig them up! We even split one of them into two bundles because it was so big.

So, there are 4 bundles of it now planted in different places in different beds around the back yard. Besides the fruit trees, they are the tallest plants we have.

We used to cut them back in October, but a gardener friend told us it’s perfectly fine to leave them through the winter. Their brown color and fluffy plumes give your sleeping beds some texture and height. And letting them die off makes them much easier to trim come spring time when they start growing again.