Hakonechloa

Hakonechloa macra 'Aureola' moves like water. That's the first thing you notice — the way the arching, golden-striped leaves cascade in one direction, creating a flowing, pouring effect that's more liquid than vegetable. A single pot of it looks like a golden waterfall. A sweep of it along a shady border looks like a stream of molten gold finding its way downhill.

The leaves are narrow, elegantly arched, striped bright gold and green, and they catch the light in a way that seems to amplify it. In a shady corner — and this is a shade-loving grass, which is unusual — it glows. It genuinely appears to generate its own luminosity, brightening dark spots without any of the harshness that yellow plants can sometimes have. The gold is warm, buttery, soft. Not acid yellow, not lime green. The kind of gold that makes shadows feel cosy rather than gloomy.

In autumn, the whole plant turns pink and then rich copper-bronze, which is a second act that most people don't expect. A plant that's been a warm golden cascade all summer suddenly shifts into burnished copper, and the autumn version is arguably even more beautiful than the summer one. It holds its autumn colour for weeks before finally fading to straw.

It's slow. Painfully slow to establish — a small pot will take three or four years to make a decent clump. But the wait is part of the investment. Each year the mound gets wider, the cascade longer, the effect more complete. I have a five-year-old clump at the base of a Japanese maple that's now about two feet across, and on an October afternoon when the maple is crimson and the hakonechloa is copper, the whole corner looks like it's on fire. Slow plants teach you something. Speed isn't everything.