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Pleasing Plantings - One Leaf at A Time.

© Carol Wallace

Go outside. If you're a gardener and it's daylight and you're not at work, that's where you should be anyway. But before you go, read on just a bit.

Take a good look at all the little things sprouting in your garden. I mean a really good look.

If your garden is anywhere near the stage my own garden is at, what you're going to see is a lot of small leaves, some spring bulbs in flower, and a couple of very early perennials. But what I want you to concentrate on, for starters, are those leaves.

The thing that struck me last spring, when things were still small and I could still tell one plant from another in that jungle I always end up growing, is that some plants' foliage exactly matched others. Others had color echoes that made them naturals for a planting combination.

For instance, Sedum sieboldiana was exactly the same color as my Stachys byzantina (lamb's ears.) So was the foliage of a Veronica incana 'Sarabande'.

The edges of the sedum shaded to a sort of purple - picked up and intensified by another sedum - my favorite 'Vera Jamieson'. And amazingly, the colors of purple sage exactly matched Vera's colors.

So there I had the beginnings of a natural planting combination. At least I knew that if I put all of these together the leaves would harmonize and look good when not in flower. So the next thing I had to consider was the flower color. The Veronica flowers early in delicate porcelain blue; the sedum is a deep rose-pink. I've never noticed the sage flowering, and routinely cut any blooms off of the lamb's ears. So far so good.

The next trick was texture. The Veronica had fine, pointy leaves and is a low grower; the lamb's ears have large, floppy, felty leaves and grows just a bit taller. They contrast well with each other. So I have an edger, and a plant to back it up. The purple sage grows tall and shrubby, and has leaves about the size of the Veronica's except longer and less pointy. It is obviously the background plant. So Vera Jamieson, with her rosettes of succulent leaves, goes in the middle of the planting, tying it all together nicely. Presto! One vignette.

And so I continue on down the border - one vignette at a time. If Horticulture magazine decides to send over the camera I have sections that are camera ready - even without bloom. So I can afford to plant another vignette next door that may not be camera ready all year, but which will look good with it when it does mature. The trick is to select bridge plants that will allow you to do something different in your next grouping but which will also tie the two together.