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Foliage all around me: And Not a Drop of Green - Page 2

© Carol Wallace

It was getting pretty blue there, so I began to search for something to lighten things up. Silver is about the brightest foliage going, and a good blend with the Russian olives' silvery foliage. And lambs ears (stachys byzantina just happen to be in plentiful supply in my gardens, as I have used them to border most of the beds. I bordered this one with a ribbon of felt-y silver, too. That looked good, so I added some dusty miller (Senecio cineraria which I had just found at an herb farm and fallen in love with because its silver was so pure and bright.

So far it was all very subtle and lovely -- now it needed some livening up. The lone pink blossom that remained on the rose bush provided a clue. I looked around til my eye fell on a huge crop of lychnis coronaria. Its foliage is almost a match for the lambs ears, but its flowers are a bright, hot pink -- anything but subtle. And since it reseeds prolifically I had more than enough to fill in any empty spaces in the new bed.

I didn't do it, though -- I didn't fill all the reamining space with lychnis. The pink is very bright, and I rather liked the subtelty that was evolving. Leave it as an exclamation point of color, I thought. Concentrate on texture.

I was almost satisfied with my creation, but while I had nice broad leaves with the lambs ears, echoed in a smaller fashion by the lychnis, with the blades of the grasses and the little round lobes of the sedum for contrast, I wanted one last texture to add a bit of punch. The dusty miller had a fine, lacy look. A batch of purple Perilla frutescens that had conveniently seeded itself everywhere, just like the lychnis, provided a more traditional leaf shape. (The picture at this link shows a green version, but you get the general idea.)In color it matched the purple-leafed sand cherries, and its medium texture played nicely off the lacy dusty miller and the more solid foliage of the other plants.

I stood back and saw that it was good. A garden created from the overflow of all the others, in perfect color harmony. Whether the lychnis blooms or not, there is color, soft and soothing. And strangely enough, there's not a wisp of green in the entire creation!

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