Texture, like bloom, important factor for gardens

While choosing plants for your garden and landscape this year, think beyond the bloom and consider one of the most important elements of garden design and beauty. This is texture.

Texture, especially when utilizing a variety of forms, brings your garden, yard and even containers to a whole new level. Incorporating texture into the garden is a fun, exciting and challenging gardening activity and one that will grow on you once you begin choosing plants especially for their texture.

Texture in the garden comes in many forms. It can be vertical, it can be trailing, it can be a filler element. It can be a specimen, standalone planting. Some of the most beautiful textures are found in ornamental grasses, ferns, flowering shrubs, tree bark and foliage plants.

By mixing and combining a variety of different textures together, along with a color scheme, bloom and varying growth heights and widths, you can create a stunning garden palette.

Some plants provide an unexpected texture display. This is especially true of coral bells, which suddenly burst into bloom in mid-summer with wonderfully textured, gemstone-studded spires in pink, white and red.

Hostas provide another unexpected texture element. As they mature, many hostas become seersuckered or corrugated, providing a beautiful and rich texture in the shade garden in classic hosta green, blue and gold.

In addition to herbaceous texture plants, don’t forget about the trees. Some of our most beautiful trees provide stunning texture in the garden. Weeping willow, with its draping curtains of amber branches, provides a stunning cascading texture. The bark of birches such as white birch, river birch and yellow birch are another wonderful way to add texture in the garden. Of course, the needles and boughs of conifers, such as spruces, pines, white cedar and juniper are an excellent texture showcase in the garden.

Ferns are a great way to add texture in the shade. With their beautiful, leafy, lacy fronds, many of our ferns are the perfect texture all-stars.

Ornamental grasses provide a beautiful texture during all four seasons when left standing for the winter. In addition to the vase shaped or vertical clumps that may reach 1-6 feet in height, depending on the species, incredible flowering plumes and spires provide feathery texture all through fall and winter.

Many of our classic annuals provide wonderful sources of texture in containers and in garden beds. Sweeping masses of sweet alyssum, as well as lacy licorice vine, wire vine, lotus vine and others are excellent sources of texture.

The flower heads of zinnias, strawflower, dahlias and marigolds also provide breathtaking textures and colors in the garden.

Foliage of such annuals as cosmos, love in a mist and marigolds also provide wonderful texture, even when the plants are not in bloom. Herbs, such as dill and fennel, rosemary and lavender are stunning texture specimens.

Succulents and sedums, including hens and chicks and many of the large-flowered sedums, even indoor succulents planted outdoors for the summer, provide wonderful texture in spirals and wheels and masses of fine, feathery blooms.

Use these examples and many more to add elements of texture to your garden this season.

Rob Zimmer is a nature and garden author, public speaker and radio show host on WHBY. Readers can find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/RobZimmerOutdoors.