Playing Foliage Favorites
In Southern California, some leaves color up briefly before they fall or get blown away by autumn’s Santa Ana winds. During a good year--and this is one--places such as Pomona, Pasadena, and the San Fernando Valley, begin to look like they could be in Vermont. Well, almost.
But big deal. There are plants that sport colorful foliage all year long in our climate. Perhaps not fiery fall colors like flame red, orange or gold, but foliage in gray, silver, lime, chartreuse, maroon, purplish and bronzy hues that make a Grinch-green garden more complex and compelling. These year-round colors are especially useful in creating a sense of space, depth and brightness in the garden.
It could be said that silver and gray plants broke the color barrier in the garden since they were the first non-green plants in many landscapes. Gray foliage can make a garden look bigger than it actually is. Los Angeles designer Christine Rosmini, whose sophisticated gardens have appeared in many books and magazines, likes to use gray foliage to make a garden’s edges seem more distant. “Gray plants look like they are far away, part of the misty background,” she said.
Gray and silvery plants also reflect light at night and glow in the moonlight. Gardens today just wouldn’t look the same without their shimmer and glow.
Variegated or golden leaves and light-green or lime ones brighten dark, shaded areas. Pasadena landscape architect Shirley Kerins said lime and light-green foliage keeps shady areas from feeling “like the dark woods with wolves all about.” Even in the sun, they stand out.
Jan Smithen, a lecturer and teacher of the popular, always-full Fanatic Gardeners class at the Arboretum of Los Angeles County, is “in love with lime-colored plants” because of the contrast of the greenish-yellow color when mixed with somber greens. Laguna Beach garden designer Christin Fusano agrees and includes a few variegated plants in every garden scheme because they “really brighten places up.”
Plants with purplish or bronzy leaves have the opposite effect. They “are like shadows” and recede from sight, adding depth to plantings, said Rosmini. Smithen favors bronzy and purplish foliage because other colors--”except perhaps yellow”--look great against these dark shades, and they help “marry other colors together.”
Rosmini doesn’t stop with just one shade of green, gold, bronze or silver, but uses “lots of colors that are closely related but not the same”--six different shades of bronze foliage, for instance, not just one. She thinks these delicate shadings give garden plantings an “opalescent” depth.
Kerins, who also organizes plant sales at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, said: “Silver was the most popular, but burgundy and lime green are the hot colors at the plant sales right now.” The four experienced gardeners offer these suggestions:
For silver and gray, Kerins grows a lavender named ‘Fred Boutin’ in her own garden because, unlike the other lavenders--which get too big and tend to collapse--this one stays dense and tight for many years. She likes to combine several kinds of silver. So next to the lavender, she grows the silvery and sticky Salvia discolor and the shimmery Helichrysum ‘Icicles.’
One way of dealing with the sometimes rampant growth of silver or gray plants is to whack them back. This doesn’t work on many kinds--lavenders and the common licorice plant will likely die after heavy pruning--but Smithen cuts the honey bush, Melianthus major, to the ground twice a year--once at rose pruning time in January and again in midsummer. “My garden is really tiny, so I have to keep things in bounds,” she explained. Otherwise, this very elegant--though slightly smelly--perennial with big, silvery, serrated leaves will grow to 10 or 12 feet tall.
For a brilliant silvery sheen that looks almost metallic, you can’t beat the bold but sometimes hard-to-grow silver sword, Astelia nervosa, according to Rosmini. Another of her favorites is the equally scarce Acacia iteaphylla, which makes a misty blue-gray shrub about 8 feet tall. It even blooms twice a year and is powerfully fragrant.
As a designer, Rosmini points out that the most useful plants with colorful foliage are not the most exciting. Pittosporum crassifolium ‘Compactum’ may be short on drama but makes a dense permanent shrub that tops out at a manageable 4 feet tall by 6 across. It’s a refined plant with leaves that have a soft gray sheen; but on the excitement scale, it’s only a notch above ‘Glacier’ ivy. This reliable variety, also a favorite of Rosmini’s, is used to landscape impossibly shady spots, which this gray-green ivy with white markings “really brightens.”
For light green, a small Australian shrub named Westringia ‘Morning Light,’ is a trooper, according to Rosmini. It only grows to several feet high and across, and has small variegated leaves that seem to glow--especially when back lit by the sun.
Helichrysum ‘Limelight’ is the classic lime-leaved plant for partial shade, but don’t expect it to last very long. It has long trailing branches that will need to be cut back after a few years, which will probably kill the plant. It is easily replaceable and so useful at brightening that this fault can be forgiven.
Similar in color is Kerins’ “absolute favorite,” a seed-grown columbine named ‘Woodside’ that is usually available at the Huntington’s May sale. She’s also fond of spotted ligularia because the yellow dots look like spots of dappled sunlight in a shady bed. A pulmonaria named ‘Spilt Milk’ will grow in deep shade and has neat white markings. Kerins couldn’t resist growing this next to a dark brown or burgundy ajuga named ‘Chocolate Chip.’ Another fun brightener is the golden breath of heaven shrub, Coleonema ‘Sunset Gold.’ “It demands shade and moisture,” said Smithen, but makes a soft, pretty lime-green shrub about 2 feet tall. “It’s one of those plants you want to pet.” Try it with azaleas, she suggested.
Several sturdy shrubs with variegated foliage are on Fusano’s list, including lily-of-the-valley shrub, Pieris japonica ‘Variegata,’ which need filtered light and an acidic soil, and “the only euonymus I’ll use in a garden,” E. japonicus ‘Microphylla Variegata.’ The oh-so-common euonymus are often described as “cast-iron” plants.
Her favorite, however, is the yellow-green oregano named ‘Jim Best,’ which is “really not for culinary use,” though it might be found in the herb section at nurseries. She uses this spreading plant’s bright golden foliage in the gaps between steppingstones.
In the last few years, all sorts of new plants with purplish foliage have appeared at nurseries, from the purple-leaved coral bells to the burgundy-leaved loropetalums, also called fringe flowers. Their leaves are described as mahogany, purple, red, wine, maroon, burgundy and other colors, but most are a similar dark shade of green suffused with purple.
The favorite of Fusano’s is the new Loropetalum chinense named ‘Sizzling Pink.’ Rosmini finds loropetalums useful and versatile too. “They’ll spill over a bank or grow up against a hot south-facing wall,” she said. Rosmini also loves the feathery texture of purple-leafed fennel and the wispyness of purple fountain grass, Pennisetum ‘Rubrum.’ Billowy and soft, it makes a great contrast for other plants. Extremely easy to grow, it doesn’t seed about like the weedy green fountain grass.
This burgundy hue can even be found in the leaves of trees, such as a redbud named ‘Forest Pansy,’ which is “just a delight,” according to Rosmini. A favorite of Smithen’s is the purple-leaved smoke tree, Continus ‘Purpureus,’ only she keeps it a small shrub by pruning it back every year to an 18-inch-tall trunk. Even though her garden is small, she managed to fit two of these into its confines, a measure of its worth.
Smithen’s “absolute favorite,” however, is the red-foliaged grape (Vitus vinifera ‘Purpurea’). She grows two. One is on a trellis with a red ‘Altissimo’ rose, and the other grows with a purple clematis. To keep them in bounds, they are pruned hard each year as if they were growing in a vineyard.
A burgundy-foliaged chervil (Anthriscus) is one of Kerins’ favorites. Named ‘Ravenswood,’ it is short, lacy and so dark that “it would look like a black hole” if it didn’t have something to set it off; so she grows it with the variegated Bowles’ golden grass, another good choice for semi-shade.
And for reddish foliage that almost approaches autumn’s hot colors, she likes some of the new nandinas and barberries with descriptive names like ‘Firepower’ and ‘Ring of Fire.’ These have colorful foliage all year long, but in the chill of fall and winter, the colors are especially bright.
