Foliage Fiesta!

This issue our gardening expert Conrad McCormick discusses the enduring beauty of foliage plants.

- Conrad McCormick

Gardening with foliage plants involves more than just planting a bit of greenery; it’s about creating a dynamic, textured, and colourful garden that provides interest through the seasons. While flowers offer transient appeal, foliage plants offer enduring beauty with their diverse shapes, forms, textures, and colours. This approach to gardening emphasises the architectural qualities and variety of leaves, which can transform your garden.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SHAPE

The shape of a plant refers to its overall silhouette or outline. When creating a garden, incorporating a variety of shapes can add visual interest and balance. Foliage plants come in numerous shapes, from spiky and upright to sprawling and rounded.

Upright and spiky plants, like ornamental grasses and yuccas, add vertical lines to the garden. Their spiky leaves create a sense of movement and direction, guiding the eye upward and adding height. These shapes can also serve as focal points or exclamation marks within the garden design. Imagine them as the punctuation in your garden’s story, shouting, “Look here!”

In contrast, rounded and mounded plants such as Hostas, Heucheras and small shrubs offer soft, rounded shapes that provide contrast to more angular forms. Then, there are the arching and cascading shapes of ferns, grasses, and arching Astelias. These plants bring a graceful, flowing quality to the garden. Their arching shapes can soften hardscapes like walls or pathways and create a sense of movement and fluidity, singly moving in the breeze.

Integrating these various shapes helps to craft a garden that is visually dynamic and balanced, with each plant contributing to the overall composition.