Sure, we all love flowers. Who can resist the heady fragrance of old-fashioned roses, the sweet scent of spring’s peonies, or the brilliant blooms of sunflowers? But as much as we adore flowers from perennials, their displays can be fleeting. Unless you plan carefully, checking bloom dates and planning plantings for a succession of flowers to extend the season—your garden beds may look lackluster and lifeless once the flowers fade.
But how can you create a lovely garden space that looks fabulous after the blooms take a bow? Focus on foliage!
Why Foliage Creates a Great Garden
Naturally, we’re not shunning flowers. After all, most of us began our gardening adventures due to a sentimental bloom that transported us to earlier days: planting pansies with Mom or popping snapdragons with friends. While flowers provide a burst of color and excitement, let’s not forget the value of foliage.
Foliage creates a stellar show to make your garden shimmer from spring through fall—with some evergreen foliage adding winter interest as well. From rich colors of heuchera to bold forms of hosta to interesting textures of wispy grasses and serrated leaves to stunning focal-point plants, foliage adds much more than just filler to a garden space. Foliage plants brighten shady spaces, cool hot patios, create tropical vibes, and add elegance to entryways.
A creative, thoughtful, well-designed garden filled with foliage plants enriches your landscape and containers, dressing your spaces with fantastic colors, shapes, forms, textures, and contrasts.
When designing with foliage, create a cohesive theme in your garden space by using color echoes.
Too many competing foliage colors create a chaotic feel, but selecting one main color to repeat throughout the garden gives the space a harmonious quality. For instance, spots of burgundy foliage surrounded by a sea of green leaves creates an interesting—but soothing—environment.
Create Great Foliage Design with Color, Texture, and Form
Using foliage to design a gorgeous garden allows you to play with colors, textures, and forms. It’s easy to brighten a landscape with a swarth of impatiens, but a well-designed garden filled with foliage plants creates a more interesting, vibrant, luxurious design that lasts throughout the seasons.
If you think of green as the primary color for foliage—you’re right. But while green leaves grace many foliage plants, you’ll find a rainbow of leaf colors to add a brilliant pop to your garden. From blue-green to chartreuse to burgundy to yellow, the choices are endless. Plus, look for plants with variegated leaves to brighten spaces.
Remember to consider both texture and form.
When you choose foliage plants, pay attention not only to color—but also to texture and form. Look for bold leaves that create a focal point in the garden—then marry them with wispy, light foliage, like grasses, that provides contrast and helps draw the eye to the focal-point plant. Big, smooth leaves growing next to clusters of small, ruffled leaves add interesting layers to the planting. Deep-green, glossy serrated fronds mixed with smooth, variegated foliage adds brightness to the bed and highlights the textural elements.
And while many foliage plants also sport flowers, like heuchera or hosta, the flowers add a secondary element of interest, with their relatively short-lived, upright blooms. Some gardeners choose to snip off the flowers and let the foliage shine on its own. The choice is yours!
When selecting foliage plants for your garden, choose plants with similar cultural requirements.
Check your plants’ tags for their preferred growing conditions: full sun or shade to part-shade, moist soil or dry, neutral soil, acidic, or alkaline. Select plants that will grow well together in the same bed or container to ensure a vibrant, flourishing foliage design. And of course, make sure they’re appropriate for your USDA hardiness zone.
Perfect Perennials for Fabulous Foliage Gardens
You’ll find an amazing variety of perennials with stunning foliage. From heuchera to hostas to ferns and more, the endless choices of perennials with pretty foliage may seem overwhelming. Just remember to choose one color—plus green, of course–to echo throughout your design to keep your garden looking harmonious instead of harried.
To get you started, take a look at a few of our favorite foliage-focused perennials:
Hostas
When you think of perennial foliage plants, hostas may be top of mind. Especially for gardeners with deep shade, hostas offer a lush, gorgeous display in garden beds and containers. But hostas have evolved from plain green leaves, with new cultivars boasting gorgeous colors, variegation, leaf shape, and size.
Plus, often known as the “friendship plant,” hostas grow easily and quickly, making them a great choice to divide and share. And, as we celebrate the “Year of the Hosta,” it’s a perfect time to explore new cultivars and begin a serious hosta collection in your garden.
Along with green, look for foliage in shades of blue and gold, as well as variegated–with medio-variegated hostas sporting light centers and dark margins, and marginal-variegated hostas boasting dark centers and light margins.
With tens of thousands of hosta varieties, you’ll find hostas in a wide range of sizes, too. From mini—less than six inches tall—to giant, growing more than 28 inches tall, you’ll discover a perfectly-sized hosta to suit your space. If you’re looking for a big, bold statement hosta, try Empress Wu. A giant green variety, it’s one of the largest hostas available. Use Empress Wu to fill space in the landscape or create a big impression with just one plant.
For a beautiful blue variety, try Shadowland® ‘Diamond Lake’. A large blue hosta, it sports a thick waxy coating, which helps it resist slugs. This cultivar is among the best hosta varieties for holding its blue coloration late into summer. Or add brightness to your shady space with Shadowland® Miss America. A large variety with multiple shades of green, the leaves show off with medium-green margins that morph into cream centers with light-green streaking.
Perhaps you need a petite hosta to line the front of a bed or add a cute accent to a container. Less than six inches tall, ‘Blue Mouse Ears’ performs beautifully and grows vigorously despite its small size. And, for interesting texture and form to mix into your beds, try ‘Silly String’. This unique hosta with narrow blue leaves and intensely wavy margins adds elegant texture and form in the garden. It’s ideal for containers or the front of the shade garden. For a bright burst of light, add Improved White Feather hosta to your beds or containers. The striking white and lime-green, thick, sturdy leaves stand upright, pointing to the sky. It’s a stunning addition to any shady border.
Ferns
One of the most popular ancient plants for tough conditions, ferns provide gorgeous texture, movement, and color in shady spaces. From towering tree forms to gorgeous groundcovers—and even some newer cultivars that look lovely as a specimen plant—ferns are foliage superstars. Whether you amass them into a green backdrop to show off other plants, create lightness in dark corners with variegated varieties, or use them as a rich groundcover in tricky areas, like slopes, ferns work hard to add a beautiful foliage display throughout your garden spaces. Plus, they’re tough: plant them in good soil, and forgo fertilizing. Deer tend to dislike ferns, too, making them especially good foliage plants for woodland areas.
With more than 250 genera and 12,000 species, you’re sure to find a fern or 50 to add great interest in your garden.
If your shade garden needs a bit of brightness, add pretty, delicate-looking Japanese Painted Fern to the landscape. Beautiful mounds of dramatic foliage stand out in shady spaces, with luminescent blue-green fronds with dark central ribs fading to silver at the edges. The short stature and spreading form makes a great addition to front borders and containers.
For a unique fern that’s sure to get the neighbors talking, Jurassic™ Brontosaurus Tongue Fern makes a great specimen plant. Growing on rocks under extreme drought conditions, this curiously beautiful evergreen species was collected in Hunan Province. Use this beauty on steep embankments in draining soils, on rotting stumps or logs, or as a container plant in partially shaded sites on a terrace. Check out the entire line of Jurassic™ ferns to add a primordial vibe to your garden.
For a rich pop of color that lasts for ages, choose Brilliance Autumn Fern. Bright orange fronds mature to dark green. In fall, the spores produced on the leaves add a brilliant red hue.
Heuchera
Commonly known as coral bells, these beautiful foliage stars add amazing color, texture, and form to your garden and containers. Innovative breeding means that you’ll find a wide range of colors and variegation, making these plants a must-have for stunning foliage displays. Plus, the upright, wispy flowers attract pollinators and provide movement in the garden, creating even more interest to the plant and the beds. Deer and rabbits shy away from heuchera, making them a good choice for areas where wildlife might snack.
A part-shade to shade-loving perennial, you’ll also find some newer cultivars that withstand full sun.
Heuchera ‘Georgia Peach’ delights with giant, rounded leaves of silvery peach with deep rose tints and prominent veining. This eye-popping plant not only looks lovely, it’s also highly heat- and humidity-tolerant, flourishing in borders or containers. In late summer, its leaves become a bit less brilliant, only to rebound gorgeously with shades of pink, red, and burgundy in autumn. Best of all, the vibrant color continues through winter in mild, warm climates.
With an amazing new look for heuchera, Frilly sports heavily ruffled and frilled foliage. The mounded plants almost look like a piece of coral sprouted in the middle of the garden. New foliage emerges with reddish tones before transitioning to shades of creamy caramel. Pale pink flowers held on mauve stems add an extra burst of color.
For a cool, soothing, icy feel to the garden, try Dolce® ‘Frosted Berry’. Huge five to six-inch silver leaves with charcoal veins provide a subtle lightness to shady gardens. New leaves emerge with a slight “frosting” to the leaves.
Plus, a Few More Favorite Foliage Perennials…
Honestly, there are so many fabulous foliage perennials that we could write a book about them all—and it would be more like an encyclopedia!
Still, we’d be remiss if we didn’t add a few more perennials that make gardens look glorious:
Cast iron plants provide a great solution for shady, dry spaces—but this new cultivar elevates cast iron plants to a new level. An attractive evergreen groundcover plant, Tokyo Skies cast iron plant showcases broad leaves with unique variegation. A water-wise cast iron plant, its vibrant dark green foliage is accented with irregular cream and white coloration. This dynamic but tough plant for shady locations looks lovely lightening shady areas but grows easily and vigorously without pampering.
While it’s one of the first perennials to bloom in spring, pulmonaria continues the show superbly once flowers fade, with its stunning spotted foliage adding whimsy to the garden. Commonly known as lungwort, ‘Spot On’ pulmonaria flowers open a unique deep salmon pink that matures to a rich blue color. Silver speckling dusts the green leaves, perfect as an accent for other shade plants after its blooms finish.
If you adore heart-shaped leaves, you’ll love brunnera. It fills spaces with pretty, heart-shaped leaves, making it a popular foliage plant. For big, bold foliage, add ‘Queen of Hearts’ brunnera to your planting plans. A silver overlay and a narrow band of dark green veining on its heart-shaped leaves makes this perennial an ideal addition to brighten shady spaces. Baby blue, forget-me-not type blooms appear in mid to late spring. The mounded habit fills landscape beds and containers, plus the cute blooms attract bees. Best of all, deer dislike brunnera.
Great Grasses and Sedges for Texture and Movement
For movement and texture in the garden, grasses make a great impact. Whether you’re looking for a big, bold statement like pampas grass, need a filler for a container, or want to add color to your landscape, the foliage of grasses and sedges looks lovely throughout the seasons.
And while you’ll find thousands of options, here are a few to get you started:
A mid-sized grass ideal for beds, Prairie Winds® ‘Lemon Squeeze’ fountain grass grows gorgeously in sunny spaces. A brilliantly colored ornamental grass, it behaves like other fountain grasses but boasts chartreuse gold leaves. One of the most vigorous gold-leafed pennisetum, it stands up beautifully to full sun with absolutely no burning. Copper panicles appear above the foliage in midsummer and provide additional interest to this three seasons grass.
Easy to grow MYSTAL™ ‘Gentle Breeze’ miscanthus adds height, texture, and color to the landscape and containers. With superfine foliage, this compact selection reaches only two to three feet tall when in full flower. It provides a long season of landscape interest. Plus, it grows gorgeously in container plantings.
For beautiful, variegated foliage in a sedge, try EverColor® Everest variegated sedge. This mounding fountain of ribbon-like white-striped green foliage adds amazing texture to the garden. Use it in containers or as a landscape specimen in beds, borders, and woodland gardens. Mass plant it for a stunning effect. This evergreen sedge is also deer-resistant.
Coleus
A tropical plant known for its striking foliage, coleus is often grown as an annual. With a wide arrays of colors—red, pink, orange, yellow, chartreuse, green, burgundy, and purple—as well as leaves ranging from one to six inches in size, you’re sure to find a variety that tickles your foliage fancy. Leaves may be pointed, scalloped, or oval, and they may sport intricate patterns or veining. And while coleus does flower, many gardeners prefer to snip off the flower spikes to focus on the dazzling foliage. Ideal for partial to full shade, some newer varieties tolerate full sun.
A few new varieties include:
A large, leafy plant, Solar Flare coleus features vibrant colors and patterns for both full sun and shade locations. This versatile, robust variety flowers very late in the season—or never. Solar Flare’s unique new pattern and leaf shape adds amazing interest to your garden. The dramatic “wavelength” of the foliage creates unusual texture in landscape beds or large containers.
All-America Selections Winner Sun Coral Candy Coleus provides showstopping colors, bold patterns, and rich textures for your garden. Place it center stage or mix it with other foliage plants to create a lush, vibrant landscape or container planting. It thrives in both sun and shade but may benefit from afternoon shade in extreme conditions.
If you’re looking for small-stature coleus but with big presence, try Spit Fire. This compact micro coleus with vibrant pink and light green coloring sports a unique leaf shape. As a bonus, it looks gorgeous in either sun or shade. Use it in containers or in the landscape. Spit Fire makes a great choice for urban gardens, balconies, or small patios.
Caladium
An old-fashioned tropical perennial that’s been in cultivation since the 1700s in Europe, caladium is the queen of gorgeous foliage. The colorful, heart-shaped leaves typically sport prominently-colored midribs, contrasting margins, and patterns that include mottled, veined, and striped. With thousands of named cultivars, you’ll find caladiums in a rainbow of colors and color combinations, including green, white, pink, rose, and red. Find more information and varieties at the Year of the Caladium
A few new varieties include:
A brand-new color for caladiums, Heart to Heart® ‘Burning Heart’ is a bronze fancy leaf variety with pink to orange spots. The medium to tall plant works well in landscapes and patio planter combinations. ‘Burning Heart’ grows well in either shade or full sun, but its full, rich color flourishes in the sun.
For a pretty-in-pink burst of brightness in your shady garden, try Pink Splash Caladium. Mostly pink with dark green veins and edges, Pink Splash also sports white speckles on the leaves. It reaches six to ten inches tall and grows best in shade.
A gorgeously colored beauty that’s sure to give your garden a lush, tropical feel, ‘Apple Blossom’ caladium makes a splash in the landscape or containers. A shade-tolerant variety with colorful foliage that lasts all summer, its showy pink leaves with crimson veins and dark green borders keep your garden looking lovely until chilly weather arrives.
And the Best of the Rest…
With so many beautiful foliage plants available, it’s hard to know when to stop. (We haven’t even talked about scrumptious shrubs with fabulous foliage, but that’s a chat for another day.)
Still, we’d be remiss if we didn’t highlight just a few more stunning foliage plants:
Royal Hawaiian® ‘Waikiki’ colocasia shakes up the colocasia world with stunning, colorful foliage. Glossy green leaves with flamboyant white and flamingo-pink veining, this beauty thrives in full sun. Disease-resistant and a compact, clumping habit – three feet tall and wide – it’s ideal for patio containers, poolside plantings, and color-packed garden beds. This is one foliage plant you want to feature front-and-center because it’s breathtaking! There’s a reason it’s a 2023 All-America Selections award winner.
The rich foliage of rex begonias provide the perfect color, texture, and interest in garden beds and containers—plus, they’re lovely houseplants to enjoy when the temperatures cool. Bewitched™ Night Owl rex begonia makes an eye-catching addition to any foliage-based garden design. The silver and black colors on the deeply cut leaves create crisp, clean contrast and makes a great companion to other annuals and perennials. Place it in a shady spot on the porch or grow indoors all year long. Perfect as an addition in your Goth Garden.
OK, we know…you usually grow cannas for their vibrant, tropical blooms. Well, not only will you enjoy beautiful flowers, but they’re secondary to the stunning foliage of Tropicanna® canna. Tall stems are crowned by large, bright orange blooms, but we’d grow this beauty for the foliage alone. Emerging bright burgundy leaves mature with stripes of red, pink, yellow, and green. This dramatic specimen provides bold color and lush texture to garden beds and is exceptional as a container specimen.
With so many stunning foliage plants to choose from, which ones will you pick? Whatever you decide, you’ll love designing garden beds and containers with fabulous foliage.
Do you know that National Garden Bureau members include the most innovative breeders and distributors of beautiful, fabulous foliage plants?
If you’re looking to add a long season of interest to your garden, check out the stunning foliage plants available from National Garden Bureau members.
About National Garden Bureau
Founded more than 100 years ago, the National Garden Bureau educates, inspires, and motivates people to grow home gardens. National Garden Bureau members are horticultural experts, and the information shared with you comes directly from these experts to ensure your gardening success.
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