Structural plants are essential in any kind of planting, large-scale or small. They provide the feel of continuity and the core to achieving a long-season effect. Foliage is the dominant characteristic of plants that give body to a planting. That doesnt rule out flowers, but flowers are not the essence of the contribution that anchor plants make to successions. Non-flowering plants are important for many reasons. Foliage makes a border more digestible. If you focus on flowers only, the impact hits your eyes so that they hurt. Foliage calms and has a unifying effect. It also prolongs a borders season so that it may well be year-round. Leaves have great advantages. They are many-faceted, even more so than flowers. The larger ones create a sculptural effect and are inclined to be bolder than most flowers and for a longer period. Leaves have a great range of shapes as well as colours and textures and, whatever their size, they can be bold. That applies to bamboos and grasses, ferns and many perennials. There are also tender bedding plants with long-season foliage cannas, castor oil plants, Tetrapanax, Eupatorium capillifolium and others on which I write later. Leaves may be light-reflecting and glossy and aware of the state of the sky at any one time and certainly of sunshine striking them. Glossy leaves will also bring light into shady places. No corner of your garden, even where the side of buildings hems you in, need be dark or dismal. By contrast, leaves may be felted and light-absorbing and of velvety texture. They invite you to grasp them between fingers and thumb. Or prickly; the very hostility with which they confront you has its own appeal. The pads of certain cacti may be far from cuddly, but they are often arranged on different planes, playing tricks with light and shade and thereby enhancing a feeling of depth and a heightened awareness of the third dimension. Because of their look-at-me element, I generally, in my own garden setting, prefer large-leaved plants to small. Gardens are, after all, for display. If leaves are tiny, as with heathers, the plant must fall back on colour for the effect it achieves. On the other hand, many colourful-foliage heathers have been bred and can give you sustenance year-round, the colours themselves changing with the season. And the plants will tend to be tougher than those which are large-leaved. With some of us, variegated-leaved plants have great appeal. Fine, but dont grow many of them all together. They need more restful, less busy surroundings to set them off. For ease of explanation, I categorize the different plants that give us structure, starting with trees. These are manipulated or not, according to scale. The size of the trees you can include in your borders also depends on the scale. If they are naturally slow-growing and slow growers generally develop the most character they will take a long time to become trees and will require no pruning at all. Corn Excerpted from Succession Planting for Year-round Pleasure by Christopher Lloyd, Christopher Lloyd All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
