Hakonechloa macra Beni-Kaze - Japanese Forest Grass

Hakonechloa macra 'Beni-Kase', also known as Japanese forest grass, is a medium-sized perennial grass with a beautifully architectural habit, both spreading and rounded, adorned with sumptuous autumn foliage. Its flexible and graceful foliage, green in summer, takes on surprising red and purple hues towards the end of the season. This hardy variety thrives in fertile, moist but well-drained soils, and slowly forms magnificent ground cover, ideal in light woodland, borders, or even in pots.

Hakonechloa macra is a rhizomatous and stoloniferous grass belonging to the poaceae family, native to the mountains of Japan. The 'Beni Kase' variety, from which it originates, forms a lush clump 50cm (20in) tall and 40cm (16in) wide, composed of very leafy stems, initially upright, then trailing, evoking waterfalls, giving the plant a very distinctive appearance. Its growth is rather slow. The deciduous leaves of this grass, initially green, gradually take on increasingly darker reddish hues until they become almost entirely purple at the end of the season. The flowers, arranged in thin spikelets, do not offer any real interest.

Magnificent in borders, the trendy Hakonechloa Beni Kase is easily cultivated in pots and will find a prominent place in a semi-shaded area of the garden alongside hostas, ferns, bergenia, or heucheras that tolerate the same growing conditions. This grass can tolerate all exposures as long as the soil remains moist in summer, for example on the banks of a pond. Nevertheless, it will thrive when used as ground cover in shaded parts of the garden, in light woodland, against an east-facing wall, or to border a bed of bushes in humus-rich and moist soil, bringing roundness and colour.