From the Washington Post:
Kurt Bluemel, a Maryland nursery owner who became nationally known as the king of grasses for the hundreds of ornamental varieties he cultivated and who re-created an entire African savannah for the Walt Disney Co.’s Animal Kingdom resort near Orlando, died June 4 at a hospice in Towson, Md. He was 81.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Hannah Petersen Bluemel.
From his wholesale nursery near Baltimore, Mr. Bluemel was at the vanguard of a gardening movement in the 1980s that championed the use of ornamental grasses and perennials as a way to bring nature, life and movement to residential landscapes he found achingly dull.
Steeped in German gardening traditions that replaced one form of grass — the lawn — with tall, attractive and dynamic grasses from meadow and prairie, he set out to grow, plant and change a suburban garden style that puzzled and bored him when he emigrated to Maryland in 1960.
It was a time when most suburban gardens featured turf, annuals and a ring of foundation shrubbery that Mr. Bluemel derisively called “prayer beads around the house.”
His successes included an array of ornamental grasses that became widespread and popular — an imperata grass he named Red Baron, an ethereal blue-green switch grass he called Heavy Metal, and the miscanthus Morning Light.
Bluemel held leadership roles in the American Horticultural Society, the Perennial Plant Association and the Maryland Nursery and Landscape Association.
Click here to read more.
To read a tribute from close friend Pierre Bennerup of Sunny Border Nurseries, click here.