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On a number of occasions I have walked into a garden and thought, “Oh, flowers, I should have more plants with flowers in my garden.” This doesn’t seem to want to happen, though. Compared to fleeting blooms, there is something about the relative constancy of foliage and the interplay of various colors, shapes and sizes that intrigue me.

This is not to say that I keep machetes stashed in parts of the garden in order to gleefully dispatch with floral interlopers- it’s just that when planting and combining, it is the foliage that is considered first. It is here that we will list plants with foliage that ranges from big and bold to fine and minute, with any number of variations in color and/or variegation in between.

TEXTURE PLANT PROFILES

	Ferula communis ssp. glauca If you are looking for the edible fennel, try foeniculum. If however one is looking for a visual feast, this giant fennel has two courses to offer. First, starting in Fall or Winter, it produces a large mound of fine foliage with a glaucous underside that tempers the mid green of the straight species. Then mid Summer a 6’-8’ flower stalk arises bearing umbels of yellow-orange flowers- a visual feast.
	Gunnera tinctoria While it is truly spectacular in mid Summer (with an ample water supply) with its leaves five feet across and supported by 4’-6’ tall, 4” diameter stems, this Chilean perennial amazes me the most in Spring when it seems to come on like one of those used car lot gorillas being inflated. In late Summer, when my Gunnera becomes a condo for tiny tree frogs, the juxtaposition of scale can be as perplexing as quantum physics.
	Acanthus mollis ‘Hollard’s Gold’ One can only imagine how much extra gilding would have been expended on Corinthian column capitals if this plant had existed in ancient times. As it is, Acanthus mollis had to travel to Feilding, New Zealand before it was to emerge with a foliage of golden yellow. This plant likes the sun for best color and, because of its relative absence of chlorophyll, does not get as large as its species.
	Prunus laurocerasus ‘Castlewellan’ Sometimes mutant genes are a good thing. While this is not an endorsement of genetically modified organisms, it is a plug for variegations in plants- this one in particular. While on close inspection, the variegation in P.l. ‘Castlewellan’ looks perhaps a bit diseased, the effect of the white and green mottled variegation in a shadier spot in the garden is one of bringing light to a dark corner.
	Pittosporum ‘Garnettii’ My first glimpse of  this plant occurred at Powys Castle in Wales, and the specimen there was lighting up a corner of a stone courtyard where Erigeron karvinskianus had been allowed to seed about in the cracks of the pavers. The green/cream of the leaves of P. ‘Garnettii’  truly glowed from the corner where it stood- it wasn’t until my own plant flowered years later did the bonus of its tiny, mahogany flowers become apparent.