How do you feel about foliage? Is it just there to provide life-support for your flowers….or can it be the very star of your show?
We’ve picked 10 plants that we reckon you could happily grow for their foliage alone, but which of our choices chime the most with you?
- If you have been reading our newsletter for a while, you might have realised that I LOVE flowers and I’ve never been one for much horticultural subtlety (can you sense Laura nodding vigorously?). But I certainly have favourite foliage too and the first of my choices is Melianthus major (honey bush).
It has grey-green pinnate leaves that look fabulous among the bright colours of summer flowers and a very strange peanutty fragrance when you rub the foliage. It’s fun challenging garden visitors to name the scent! It would be a striking addition to a jungle-look garden. A hard frost will cut it to the ground but, at least in my southern garden, it re-clothes itself with the lovely leaves by mid-summer.
2. Ferns make a quieter statement but still have a real presence and a striking structure. You can find some very fancy ferns but I don’t think there is much to beat a well-grown native fern Dryopteris filix mas with its starburst shape lighting up a shady corner of the garden. It looks lush but doesn’t demand endless watering so it would be a great choice for a dark dry corner which you might otherwise ignore. It looks tatty at the end of winter (I know how THAT feels), so trim all the leaves right back to the exciting ‘knuckles’ of new fronds ready to unfurl from the centre.
3. Cardoons are whacking great plants! Grown in full sun, their thick silver flower-stems can easily reach 8-9ft, topped by curious artichoke-like flowers. Their enormous silvery jagged leaves make an amazing focal point at the back of a border. I’ve never eaten cardoons but apparently the Victorians loved eating the blanched stems so I looked up a recipe – way too much faff for me. Mind you, I’m famous for finding toast quite a challenge.
Yes Elaine has always been rather of the ‘buy ’em cheap and stack ‘em high’ school of gardening but she’s actually recommended some pretty good summer foliage choices this week.
4. I am currently spellbound by Macleaya cordata. To be honest the leaves alone would be sufficient reason to grow it but when it’s tall feathery buff-pink plumes burst up it’s breathtaking. It never stays where you plant so you just have to go with the flow.
5. My next wonder is courtesy of Louise who gave me a bunch of Ricinus communis seedings, the castor oil plant. I’ve never grown it before but as Louise’s plant profile of it has been the most read ever (possibly by international terrorists researching how to extract ricin from its seeds so no doubt disappointed to learn only about its virtue as a pot plant) I thought I would give them a go.
The leaves are stunning, and although the flower is small at the moment I believe its seed pod matures to balance out the leaves in late summer/autumn.
6. Aristolochia – all right so I can’t resist sticking in a weird one. Aristolochia grandiflora needs a frost-free environment in warm shade (I can already sense the pursing of the lips from the sisterhood….). Once given what it likes, it rewards you with masses of delicate, twining perfectly heart-shaped leaves before the other worldly buds start appearing, to suddenly burst open into foul-smelling purple apparitions. The Addams Family would love them.
7. Just to prove that I’m not (always) the plant eccentric my sisters make me out to be, I have followed Elaine’s lead and am singing the praises of a native plant. It’s not rare, it’s not difficult to grow, but every time I leave a patch of teasels (Dipsacus fullonum) to grow in the garden I am blown away by their architectural presence. The spiky flowers always sit so satisfactorily atop its helpfully quite see-through stems and leaves. The bees love them in summer, the goldfinches love them in winter.
Two issues with my sisters’ recommendations. Cardoons don’t like peaty, wet or gusty locations (ie my garden), and Laura’s Macleaya? Like Claire Balding on the telly, it pops up everywhere. I agree it has quirky foliage but she’s understated its wayward ways.
8. My choices have a lower centre of gravity and are generally self-sustaining. First up, it’s got to be Alchemilla mollis hasn’t it? Beautifully designed by Mother Nature, its geometric leaves sparkle in the wet like a glitterball and there isn’t a garden it won’t grow in. Granted, it’s a little enthusiastic with its seedlings but at least they aren’t snaking around under the soil (step forward Macleaya!)
9. Another foliage love of my life is Viburnum rhyditophyllum or ‘leatherleaf viburnum’. The veined leaves and brown fuzzy stems of this evergreen look positively exotic in January. The odd minus-12 deflates them a little, but they bounce back like a show pony the next morning.
10. Finally rhododendrons. Skip the garden centre, go to a rhodo specialist and apply the ‘interesting foliage’ filter. The new growth on some of them is simply sensational. Greatly encouraged by my acquisition of the compact Rhododendron ‘Silbervelous’ (our feature pic) and R. ‘Yakushimanum’, I spotted R. ‘Yum Yum’ at Glendoick Nursery’s Chelsea stand this year, and was stopped in my tracks by the description: ‘Branchlets and buds densely tomentose.’ No, I didn’t have a clue either, but I was definitely up for some ‘tomentose’ if no one else had it!
If you fancy seeing us talk about the foliage in our gardens that we really rate, do click on this short video on our YouTube channel – at least it’ll show you that we honestly do grow the plants we write about!🤣
What lovely foliage pulls you up short in the garden over the summer? We’d love to hear about your recommendations..
Did you inherit any plants when you moved house? Louise did, and she still loves it many, many years later. Not scented, mildly invasive, a colour that Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter called ‘villainous’ but she would still hate to be without it……find out what it is here…..
Have you started to harvest produce from the garden? You are going to need chopping boards in the kitchen to prepare it all for delicious summery feasts, and we have some beautiful ones in our online shop, just perfect for the job. They make an ideal gift to take to a summer gathering too……
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3 replies on “10 fabulous foliage plants”
How could you miss out the burgundy smoke bush? It offers an enormous splash of colour and makes an excellent filler in a vase for floral arrangements.
Hi Linda, Elaine here. That is a brilliant suggestion – smoke bush (Cotinus) really has the most beautiful foliage and as you say, it looks great with colourful flowers in a vase. I used to have one, and my only gripe with it was that it started growth rather late in the spring and I wanted that colour to go with my early bulbs. Another shrub that I adore for the purpose of providing a foil for other colours is Physocarpus ‘Lady in Red’, whose shoots begin orange and change to a luminous burgundy gradually over the summer. It doesn’t have those mistily pretty flowers that a smoke bush has, though!
I do love ferns in all different areas of the garden, some copper, some silver with purple veins, sone huge and almost fluffy, some with golden green with hairy scales on the fronds. I couldn’t be without them plus grasses especially the golden ones and the copper ones. Rodgersia podophylla with those huge bronzy coppery leaves that turn green. Acer palmatum dissectum garnet has deep purple foliage with green undertones, Acer shirasawanum aureum golden green leaves with red tinges and red stems, verbena bonariensis dawn has dark green, textured leaves with bright red stems and I do love some of the heucheras (I even cut the white flowers off the very dark purple ones).