colored foliage
Black plants in the garden
There are many ways to make your garden into something special. One way that is sure to grab attention is to use exotic black flowering plants or foliage in your garden. Naturally dark foliage has been concentrated in a number of hybrid plants to create breath-taking beauty for the garden. Here is a list of just some of the plants you can use to create drama. Most of these are actually pigmented with dark burgundy or blue colors to give the effect of looking almost like pure black. Use them for accents or group these plants into pools of dark mystery. Or create a shadow garden of dark plants to form a silhouette against a light colored wall.
For a small tree or large shrub, try the Black Elderberry, Sambucus Black Lace™ or Sambucus Black Beauty ‘Gerda’. These elderberries also offer flat panicles of tiny but showy pink or white flowers that contrast with the dark foliage.
Ophiopogon planiscarpus ‘nigrescens’ is a small, flat-leafed plant that looks like deep, black grass. It is called black mondo grass and flowers with small lavender-pink flowers followed by dark berries. This is a slow growing, evergreen (more like ever-black) perennial.
Phormium ‘Black Adder’ is one of the most recent introductions in the world of colorful New Zealand flax plants. It grows modestly to under three feet tall with the blackest foliage offered in these handsome sword-leafed plants.
Black pansy and black petunia are two annuals that offer dark purple flowers that verge on being black. The ‘Black Velvet’ series of petunias are recent introductions that are becoming very popular.
Black Barlow columbine is a dark burgundy-flowered version of the double-flowering Aquilegia. This one is a little more red than some of the more recent black flowers being introduced into the marked.
Aeonium arboreum var atropurpureum ‘Schwarzkopf’ is the black tree aeonium. It is a three-foot branching succulent with leaves of darkest mahogany that grow in a rosette and almost look like flowers – until the plant shoots out its real flowering spikes of bright yellow flowers.
The imperial taro or black caladium (Colocasia esculenta or Colocasia antiquorum var. Illustris) is a moisture-loving plant with large leaves. There are some very black colored cultivars like ‘Illustris’, ‘Jet Black Wonder’ or ‘Black Magic’. These dramatic, arrow shaped leaves can be real attention-getters in damp parts of the garden or in a bog or pond area.
Black Irises come with choices. These are iris flowers with deep purple pigments that can look quite black. The bearded iris ‘Superstition’ is one such plant. Known as black irises are the Middle Eastern Iris nigricans, Iris susiana, Iris petrana and the Iris chrysographes from southern China. They are dark enough to earn their common name.
These are just some of the possibilities you can use to add the drama of black to your garden design. These dark colors add mystery and contrast to any garden. They’re likely to draw attention and comments from anyone discovering them in your garden.
Designing with Colored Ornamental Grasses
A selection of colored ornamental grasses and grass-like plants
You can get year round color from planting ornamental foliage in your garden. Interesting shapes, textures and colors from leaves can add décor that remains the backbone of a good garden design as flowers and berries come and go with passing seasons. Some colorful ornamental grasses and grass-like plants do go dormant in the winter, but their decorative foliage lasts much longer than most flowers.
One note of warning: some ornamental grasses have become invasive in different parts of the country. Check you local agriculture advisers to learn which one’s are not eco-friendly in your area before planting them. Here is a list of some of the more colorful ornamental grasses and grass-like plants that you can use for foliage. This list is pretty safe for at least the Southern California area.
- Calimagrostis – This is a large-growing ornamental grass that can turn wonderful colors in the autumn.
- Carix – These grasses come in a wide range of colorful foliage and interesting shapes. You can find carix in oranges, yellows, blues, grays, greens and more. Some have curly foliage, some smooth, some like wire. There are a few excellent drought-resistant varieties that are eye-catching. Most are low growing and clump-forming.
- Cordyline – The cordyline is not a true grass and will grow a thin trunk like a sparsely branched tree over time. Many varieties have purple, yellow, burgundy and even hot pink leaves. Use this one as a focal point in your garden or work the color into a space where it can be appreciated.
- Festuca – Look for greens and blues in this generally smaller-growing grass. There are a number of different varieties from the small clumps of Festuca ovata glauca — often seen in drought-tolerant gardens, to the red fescue that shimmers down hillsides as a groundcover plant.
- Helictrichon – Blue Rye grass has handsome powder blue leaves. It has a striking effect on the landscape with its half-inch, contrasting colored leaves.
- Mellica – There are a number of cultivars of this medium height green decorative grass. One type grows wild on some California hillsides in the chaparral.
- Miscanthus – This offers large group of grasses most of which go dormant in the winter. Varieties can sport wonderfully patterned and painted foliage with whites, greens and yellows.
- Muhlenbergia capilaris – Use this clumping grass as a nice, textural, smaller grass that blooms with delicate clouds of pink in the autumn.
- Muhlenbergia dumosa – Bamboo Grass has long thin, bamboo stems and will grow tall to about 4’ when stems mature. It is a rangy, but attractive ornamental grass.
- Muhlenbergia rigens – Deer grass is a neat, clump-forming, cylindrical-bladed grass that is extremely drought tolerant and will handle the hottest sun.
- Penisetum ‘Moudry’ – Black fountain grass has green foliage and black fuzzy inflorescences (flowers). It is unusual and artistic, but can re-seed into flower gardens and lawns.
- Penisetum rubrum – Red fountain grass is the familiar burgundy grass often used in our area. This plant is easy to grow, decorative and sterile. Do NOT use the plain green Penisetum (Fountain Grass) cultivars unless you don’t mind it invading everywhere!
- Phalaris – ‘Feesy’s Strawberries and Cream’ is a low, sometimes somewhat invasive grass that is mostly white with green streaks and new growth is flushed pink. This one is highly decorative and is invasive only if it can get sufficient water.
- Phormium – This is not a true grass but a very decorative sword-leaved plant that makes a bold statement in the garden. The New Zealand Flax comes in an assortment of outstanding colors with stripes and streaks that can look painted.
This is just a small selection of colorful and textural ornamental grasses and grass-like plants you can use in your garden. Choose the varieties that will do best in your climate and soil and plant them where their vertical shapes and lasting color will have the best impact on the design of your garden.
The New Zealand Flax or Phormium
There are few plants that offer the bold vertical growth and wide range of colorful foliage for the garden as the New Zealand Flax. The Phormium is a perfect plant to add year round color in gardens that don’t dip much below the low 20’s F. With its long, strap leaves, this plant can be used as a sentry to welcome you through an entryway, as a backdrop for shorter, rounder plants, as a companion to a boulder, a water garden, a statue or as a focal point all alone. Not only does the New Zealand Flax make a statement in the garden, you can find Phormium plants in a range of wonderful colors that will paint your garden even in the dreariest season. This plant can handle water so long as the drainage is good and it is also drought tolerant. The plain green and red varieties handle hot sun better than the colorful leaves. In hot, chaparral or desert locations, give Phormiums some shade. In areas where the sun is not so strong they can handle full sun. Here is a partial list of some of the wonderfully colored varieties of New Zealand Flax you can grow in your landscape.
- Reds and maroons: P. (Phormium) ‘Dazzler’, P.’Dusky Chief’, P. ‘Firebird’, P.’Guardsman’, P.’Monrovia Red’, P.’Rubrum’, P.’Tom Thumb’, P. ‘Amazing red’
- Peaches: P.’Flamingo, P. ‘Jester’, P.’Sunset’, P.’Apricot queen’
- Pinks: P.’Pink Stripe’, P.’Sundowner’
- Yellows: P.’Yellow Wave’, P.’Golden Sword
- Blacks: P.’Dark Delight’, P.’Chocolate’, P.’Bronze baby’, P. ‘Platt’s Black’
- Green: Phormium tenax, P. cookianum, P. ‘Sea Jade’ (with bold dark maroon center stripe)
- White/Cream: P. ‘Variegata’, P. ‘Tricolor’
- Mixed colors: P. ‘Mauri maiden’, P. ‘Mauri queen’, P. ‘Mauri chief’, P ‘Mauri Sunset’
And this is just a sampling of all the wonderful varieties of New Zealand Flax or Phormium plants that can add color to your garden.
The Colorful Winter Garden
One of the delightful aspects of living in a mild winter climate is that you can enjoy being outdoors year ‘round. Some of the most pleasant weather for basking in the outdoor sun occurs in the winter and spring months in places where summers get hot. Keeping your garden colorful and interesting all year, however, can get a bit tricky. If you want a colorful winter garden, you need to plan for it all year round.
The springtime is the most popular time for plants of all types to show off their flowers. In the autumn, there are a number of plants that prefer to be late season bloomers. The summer can be so hot in some areas that there are fewer plants willing to offer up delicate and colorful petals to searing sun. In milder summer climates, this too, is a good time to be gardening. Here are some thoughts on the colorful winter garden.
Some plants willing to add color to our gardens in late winter and early spring are annuals like stock, with its sweet perfume, snapdragons (antirrhinums) and pansies. All may get seared by a random late frost or early hot sun, but most manage to hang in despite the occasional weather challenges. Albeit this is the season for a lot of perennials to come into bloom it is also one of the best planting times, so it’s worth considering including some plants with more to offer than just flowers.
One of the best ways to assure color in the garden all year, no matter what season, is to get some of that color in foliage rather than depending exclusively on flowers. Colored foliage can be either ‘self’, meaning a single color, or variegated, with more than one color. Curiously enough, some green plants with a random white or yellow variegation like marbling get their coloring from a viral infection that has no adverse effect on the health of the plant. More regularly-patterned colors are usually genetically programmed. You can find a variety of colored leaves in plants of all sizes. Most plants with a lot of yellow or white require shading areas that get very hot summers. Since the lighter colors denote an absence of chlorophyll, these plants burn in bright sun, especially where humidity is low.
One of the most popular trees with deep purple foliage is the ornamental plum. It is a very tough and drought-tolerant tree. A relatively small tree, growing from 10 to 20 feet tall, it is easy to care for and adds a dark color note in the tree family. Sometimes an individual tree will bear fruit even thought these plums are bred to be fruitless. The fruits are usually small and not particularly edible. Be aware that the ornamental plum does go dormant in the winter.
A bush that can eventually grow into tree proportions if it has enough water, reasonable soil and time, is the Hopseed Bush (Dodonea purpurea). This one can fill in with height or width and offers foliage with a strong red tinge. It will not do well in a hard frost. A bit tougher, with shiny green leaves that are bright red when young, is the Photinia. Varieties can be shrub to tree sizes. More interesting trees with fanciful leaf shapes that shade toward purple are the Acacia baileyana (evergreen with yellow flowers) and the Cotinus (purple smoke tree). Both have proved to be quite frost resistant.
Phormiums, commonly known as New Zealand Flax, come in a wonderful rainbow of colors. Their sword-shaped leaves are a delightful contrast to the mounding form of most other plants. But their prettiest colors often burn in very hot summer sun so they do best in dappled shade in desert-like heat. Having become used to thinking of them as delicate, I was quite surprised at how even the most fragile looking plant bore a cold snap down into the low teens without a complaint.
Some variegated varieties of common plants like Agapanthus and Lirope will burn from a hard frost. The variegated society garlic, being a clump of tiny bulbs is more hardy.
Many chaparral plants grow grey, whitish and even fuzzy leaves to deal with the bright sunshine. These provide an excellent foil for bright and dark greens. The Teucrium fruticans azurea (Germander) grows into a soft grey shrub that blooms with sky blue flowers in the middle of the winter. There are a number of smaller Teucriums with pink or purple flowers that were highly successful as well. I love the salvia chamaedryoides with its on foot height, bright blue flowers (yes, I tend to be partial to unusual blues) and its almost white foliage. Some artemesias also fared well in cold weather with their fine grey foliage. There are many more colorfully-leaved plants to chose from, many with colorful flowers as a bonus. So even with extreme heat and unexpected cold, there are still many fascinating plants to offer colorful foliage to keep your garden lively all year ‘round. Yes, you can even have a colorful winter garden!
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