Here are 5 ways to create color and textural contrast in your landscape

When we go to the garden center, the overwhelming characteristic we often look for in our landscape plants is their flowers.

But when it comes to the year-round staples in the garden, the woody trees and shrubs, their flower display is often little more than a quick blip in the bloom calendar. It makes a big show of itself ... but the show is usually fleeting.

Most woody plants offer little more than 10 days to two weeks of floral show. Herbaceous perennials can offer a longer bloom season but eventually, even their show ends. After that, it’s foliage that holds the day... or not. When you consider that a deciduous, woody plant will have leaves on the branches for eight months or so during the year, it’s easy to understand that foliage characteristics probably warrant greater consideration as we select plants for the yard.

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How to create color and textural contrast in your landscape

One of the easiest ways to add season-long drama and contrast to the landscape is by using plants with contrasting foliage colors. Deep burgundy, screaming gold, soft chartreuse ― whether you lean toward eye-popping contrasts or gentle color gradations, today’s plant market offers almost endless options. To use colored foliage plants effectively in the landscape, you need to understand the pigments and the physiology behind the show.

Burgundy/red pigments in plant leaves come from a class of compounds called anthocyanins. It’s the same family of compounds responsible for the brilliant reds and burgundies of fall foliage color. They can be dramatic and stunning, but they do come with limitations. Anthocyanins are not particularly stable under warm weather conditions. That’s why they shine best in newly produced, spring leaves and late-season fall shows. As spring turns to summer, most red-leafed varieties gradually turn to a muddy color as anthocyanins decrease and the green of chlorophyll peeks through.

Of course, like anything in nature, there is tremendous variation in anthocyanin persistence and production, and plant breeders constantly work to tease out better and better color performance in their new releases. That’s one of the reasons there are hundreds of varieties of red-leafed Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) on the market, and new forms emerge every year.

To get the most out of your red-leafed plants, site them in full sun. Shade tends to favor the greens over the reds.

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Gold and yellow foliage comes from compounds that fall into the xanthophyll and carotenoid families, and like the anthocyanins, are generally brightest in full sun. However, there are a couple of additional limitations.

Many plants with yellow leaves tend to be susceptible to scorching in full, hot sun. In shade, they often turn a bit yellow-green. So, getting the best out of your yellow foliage means finding just the right exposure. Full sun for the first half of the day followed by some shade during the hottest part of the afternoon is usually a good place to start.

Blue foliage offers a very different scenario in the landscape. Most blue-foliaged leaves don’t produce the show with unique pigments. Rather they are usually the result of waxy substances on the surface of the leaves. Whether a bright blue spruce (Picea pungens var. glauca) or a blue form of hosta, it is the surface composition that offers the blue. And like the reds and yellows, blues do best in more sun than shade.

One caveat on the blues — the wax is easily wiped off the foliage and some pesticide formulations can dissolve the waxy substances. So tread carefully. As hard as it is to avoid rubbing a thumb across your bright blue hosta leaf, it can leave a dark green streak for the rest of the season.

Variegated foliage ― leaves with various combinations of green, yellow, red, and white ― can make spectacular shows in the garden but you have to pay attention to the limitations of the various colors in the leaves. A plant with mostly green leaves with a yellow/green halo around the edge will likely hold up to full sun better than will a leaf that’s mostly soft yellow with a white edge.

In the end, finding the right marriage of plant variety and garden setting takes a bit of experimentation. Some yellow-leafed plants hold up great in full sun. Others need mostly shade. Same with red and variegated selections.

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Textural contrast: While generally a bit less in your face than some of the colored foliage contrasts, today’s plant offerings provide loads of potential for adding drama and interest to the garden. Whether big, bold, and bodacious, or fine, delicate, and subtle, texture variations offer the designer one more set of tools to carry garden interest through the summer months

One of the advantages of employing texture contrasts is that, unlike foliage color, foliage texture rarely comes with exposure limitations. A fine-textured leaf doesn’t necessarily need any more or less shade, water, or fertilizer, than a coarse-textured selection.

From the 3-foot-long leaves of the big leaf magnolia (Magnolia macrophylla) and the dinner-plate-sized leaves of ‘Empress Wu’ hosta, to the delicate sprays of ornamental grasses and ferns, texture contrasts can keep the summer garden from hitting the design doldrums.

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Paul Cappiello is the executive director at Yew Dell Botanical Gardens, 6220 Old Lagrange Road, yewdellgardens.org.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Landscape tips to create color and textural contrast in summer 2024