It is easy to find garden centers in the US selling the Red Tender Fountaingrass or some other cultivars with reddish or copperish foliage color, but it is not easy to find the original species with green foliage. In the 1990's I found some seed source of this green-foliaged form, started the seedlings in a small greenhouse and grew them up into mature plants. Before the frost would strike in fall, I would dig up all the Tender Fountaingrasses and store them in the small greenhouse at the hospital where I worked around the grounds in northeast Illinois. I would usually divide them, repot them, grow them on awhile in the greenhouse before placing them outside again in May. This green form is perfectly beautiful and should be used as an annual plant in the northern US along with the red or other colored forms. This species comes from eastern Africa where it is a perennial in that or any tropical climate. It can escape cultivation in the warmer parts of the Southwest USA and become invasive down over there.

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