Thinopyrum ponticum Seeds | Tall Wheatgrass
LATIN NAME: Thinopyrum ponticum
COMMON NAME: Tall Wheatgrass
Plant Profile
Tall wheatgrass is a robust, long-lived perennial of the grass family, native to the salt steppes of south-eastern Europe, Anatolia and western Asia. It grows ninety to a hundred and eighty centimetres, with broad, grey-green leaves and long, slender spikes whose spikelets carry short awns, giving a stand the pale, rough look of a salty meadow.
It is one of the tallest of the wheatgrasses and one of the latest to flower, which extends the grazing season into midsummer. The roots go down two metres, and the plant tolerates both salinity and waterlogging, a combination that few grasses manage. It is also one of the parents used in wheat breeding, because of its resistance to several diseases.
Science & Biotechnology
Thinopyrum ponticum is a decaploid, with seventy chromosomes in ten sets, and its genome is one of the largest among the wheatgrasses. That redundancy is part of why it is so broadly tolerant, and it has made the species a source of genes for wheat: resistance to wheat streak mosaic virus and to several rusts has been transferred from it into cultivated wheat by wide crosses.
The species is a standard choice for the revegetation of saline land. It establishes on soils with electrical conductivity that kills lucerne and most clovers, and it has been used to stabilise the edges of saline lakes and to bring dryland salinity sites back into production. Its salt tolerance depends on excluding sodium at the root and on storing it in the older leaves, which are shed.
Uses & Benefits
It is cut for hay and grazed in saline districts, and it is one of the few productive grasses on land affected by dryland salinity. It is also used for windbreaks, for erosion control on banks and for the margins of evaporation basins, where its deep roots and tall growth reduce wind speed and hold the soil.
In a garden it is a bold architectural grass for the back of a border or a large gravel planting, where its grey leaves and tall spikes are effective for most of the summer. It needs space and should not be planted in a small bed, since a single clump can reach nearly two metres. It is also useful for a salty coastal garden, where few other tall grasses survive.
Growing from Seed
Sow in autumn or early spring at fifteen to twenty kilograms per hectare, or three grams per square metre for a patch, one to two centimetres deep. Germination is slower than that of the ryegrasses and may take three to four weeks at 15-20 °C.
Keep the site moist through the first summer, then stop irrigating; the plant is more salt-tolerant and longer-lived when it is not pampered. It needs full sun and will not tolerate shade. Cut the old growth back in late winter, and divide the clumps every five or six years, since the centre eventually becomes bare and the flowering weaker.
Our Take
A two-metre grass for saline land and the back of a big border, and a wild relative that has lent wheat its disease resistance. Give it room.
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