Injecting texture in your garden — aside from having lots of blooms and colors — is one sure way to make your garden command attention. Texture highlights your garden’s good parts while overshadowing the weaker areas. Blooms and colors are like the main ingredients in a recipe for a good garden, and texture acts as the spices. Like spices in our food, texture in plants garnishes flavor and zest to your garden, making the whole visual experience delectable and distinctive, and complete.
Texture is best attained by bold, uniquely shaped leaves and flowers. Most leaves and flowers are medium-sized, where typical leaves look like a heart or oval and are the size of our ears, and because they are everywhere in your garden they lose their otherwise nice appeal and become run-of-the-mill features.
Heighten the appeal and drama by adding contrast, by combining coarse-textured plants with medium or fine-textured plants. In our garden, we love the interplay of the broad and large leaves of hostas and the fine, long leaves of ornamental grasses.
Adding plants with unique, bold, and big leaves is one easy way to inject texture into a garden
Typical flowers have rosettes or bunched-up little flowers with five or six petals the size of a penny or smaller. Again, because these are the usual form and size of blooms they somehow become ordinary, unless their colors are off the common palette. So the easiest way to gain texture is to seek out and add plants that don’t have the typical leaves and flowers.
Rough, coarse textures tend to create informal mood and are visually dominant. When talking about texture in leaves, we mean large leaves, perhaps the size of at least a person’s head, the larger the better; leaves that have bold deep veins looking like those bulging veins of very muscular arms and legs of bodybuilders; leaves with very irregular edges, like the fronds of palms, the curls of coleus, or the spikes of most cacti; variegated colors, the louder the colors the better or the more distinct the patterns or variegation, the more desirable; even contorted twigs or burly, colored and streaked branches.
We’re talking about the unique, the unusual, the colorful features that call for anyone’s attention. They don’t whisper, they shout. That’s how they force you to pay attention to them.
Texture also means literal texture. When you go plant shopping, don’t be afraid to get hands-on with your prospects, because sometimes the feel of a plant means just as much as how it looks. Take the lamb’s ear, for example. It looks velvety, and when you run gently your fingers on the leaves, you get a sense of being tickled or caressed. That’s also texture.
Of course, you need not touch the prickly cacti unless you want a painful, even bloody, prick. Cacti are very textural, maybe not nice to the touch but they definitely catch the eyes.
Texture is clearly felt by touch, and is easily picked up by the eyes. It delights our sense of drama and heightens our overall satisfaction.
Coarse textured and/or large foliage plants often add a tropical touch to gardens – even in colder climates! People love the tropics, and even simulating a tropical place is good enough for people who can not physically travel for whatever reasons.
Finer textured plants like ornamental grasses, dwarf bamboo, and cordylines often allow motion to play an interesting role in the garden, where even a slight breeze will send them swaying gently. Movement adds drama and sensory satisfaction.
On the other end of the size spectrum, plants with small leaves and or petite blossoms are generally fine-textured plants. They give a light and airy feeling to a garden. Fine textures, including leaf textures and soft colors, can often accentuate nearby textural plants. They act like supporting actors to the main actors.
Beautiful blooms are well and good, but what really brings a bang are plants that are there before and after the show.
Seek out plants with different-shaped leaves and colored foliage. If you’re hard-pressed in finding a favorite, play safe and go for the lush look of tropical plants.
Almost a no-fail design is to place the giant textural plants in the back or the center of a garden grouping and surround them with contrasting fine textural plants. This gives a layered effect. This also creates depth to the grouping, giving the grouping fullness and a bigger-than-real-size 3-D optical illusion.
Garden ornaments and furnishings can also add constant texture to the garden. A friend’s garden whose husband has crafty hands with metals gains deeper beauty to her garden by sprinkling metal ornaments all throughout the garden. Quite smart and proactive, since when most plants have taken their final bow to sleep from late fall to mid-winter, the hand-made ornaments carry on the show and the drama in the garden.
Well-proportioned garden ornaments work nonstop, all four seasons, in the garden.
Whatever texture you prefer or draws your eye, and however you add texture to your garden, start adding more plants to your garden with texture in mind. And don’t get so worried about creating a perfect, magazine-worthy garden full of texture, beauty, and drama. Just experiment and have fun. Often, the process is as satisfying as the end result. Really, just do it!
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