Evaluation on development and application of wild ornamental grasses in nature reserves of Guangdong Province

The aim of the study is to enrich the diversity of garden herbs in Guangdong Province, and to highlight the garden characteristics of subtropical urban in South China. Doing so is in order to solve the current problems of few ornamental grasses and single application forms. In this study, 149 native wild ornamental grasses with high ornamental value were obtained from 280 ornamental grasses which were screened from 14 nature reserves in Guangdong Province. The method of grey correlative analysis was utilized to evaluate comprehensively the 149 native wild ornamental grasses, to select excellent landscaping materials which were suitable for Guangdong Province. The results showed as follows: 1) wild ornamental grasses were widespread adapted in forest-edge-wetland and river in the valley, where they accounted for 54.36% of the total. They accounted for 41.61% in hillside grassland and prairie shrub land. 2) They were more resistant, water resistance species accounted for 65.10%, drought resistance species accounted for 27.52%, salinity resistance species accounted for 7.38%. 3) Wild ornamental grasses have strong ornamental characteristics. The evaluation scores of 53 wild ornamental grasses inflorescence and plant ornamental value were more than 2. 4) The comprehensive evaluation results showed that the degree of correlation with ideal species, in 22 of the 149 wild ornamental grasses, was higher than 0.7, which had higher ornamental value, adaptability and application potential. 5) 5 species showed a degree of correlation with ideal species higher than 0.8, including Saccharum spontaneum, Setaria pumila, Belamcanda chinensis, Iris speculatrix, Miscanthus sinensis, which could be directly used in landscape design.