Like the audience of any magic show, Chicago Flower & Garden Show visitors are likely to stand in front of some of the show gardens wondering, “How did they do that?” And more to the point, “How can I do that at home?”
But unlike the trick of sawing a person in half, the magic in these gardens isn’t achieved through illusions. The show’s gardeners have mastered one of the hardest tricks in garden design: combining plants to get the maximum visual value out of each.
A garden is much more than a bunch of favorite plants stuck together in one yard; it’s a careful composition of plants whose colors, textures, shapes and sizes work together as if they were threads in a woven tapestry. That’s why so many gardeners now focus more on plant combinations than on individual plants–they know that with garden plants it really is true that it takes two (or more) to tango.
Combining plants successfully takes practice, but many of us have more training at it than we are aware, suggests Amy Reynolds, a landscape designer at the Winfield nursery Planter’s Palette and a scheduled speaker at the flower and garden show. We already have ideas on how to furnish a room, she says, and some of the same principles apply.
“You wouldn’t fill a living room with six blue couches,” Reynolds says. “You mix couches and chairs and tables, and you get it all working together. It’s the same thing with combining plants.”
Those couches and chairs would rarely all be the same fabric, same color, same lines. The same principle goes for plants too. The best way to highlight a certain plant is by positioning it next to or among plants that contrast with it. A plant whose leaves are big and jagged-edged visually leaps out when grown among needle-leafed counterparts, and a fluid mound of greenery makes a suitable complement for a bolt-upright shock of foliage in another plant.
Although gardeners tend to consider flower color first, it isn’t all that makes a good plant combination. In many cases, a plant’s foliage and overall shape are visible for a much longer part of the year than its flowers, so those attributes are more important, Sean Conway says. The garden consultant for Target stores nationwide and a Chicago Flower & Garden Show speaker, Conway also owns his own nursery in Rhode Island.
“You can get a lot more visual interest when you pay attention to things like the color and the texture of the foliage,” Conway says. “You have so much more to work with, and the effect you create can be much more dramatic.”
The blooms, he says, are “icing on the cake.”
Conway says the best place to start is with container gardens, because the wide variety of annuals and small perennials available now makes it easier to create beautiful combinations. Plus, it’s easy to make new combos during the season as various team members pass their peak and need replacing.
In addition to noting what plants mingle well together in the show gardens, you also can get a head start on combining plants from the new book “Take Two Plants” by Nicola Ferguson (Contemporary Books, $27.95). Photos of more than 400 eye-catching combinations provide a beginner’s guide to the arresting effect two plants can attain when they work together. Its photos demonstrate how, for example, various varieties of hostas can be paired with astilbe, spurge, yew, Jacob’s ladder or bleeding heart for extra garden drama.
It’s important to keep in mind there are no strict rules or formulas for plant combinations.
Nevertheless, some basic guidelines apply. “A lot of fine-leafed plants all together start to look weedy,” says garden book author and Chicago Flower & Garden Show speaker Susan McClure. But combine fine-leafed columbines with fat-leafed hostas and “you’re making the most of both plants.”
Conway advises mixing plants by habit as well–such as pairing plants that sprawl or cascade with those that stand erect for a fuller effect.
In her latest book, “The Free-Spirited Garden” (Chronicle Books, $18.95), McClure advocates a style of gardening that lets plant combinations happen on their own and then edits out the least attractive ones.
It’s kind of like the sculptor who eliminates all the pieces of a block of stone that aren’t part of the finished work of art. “If plants put themselves in places that look crowded or where the colors are all wrong for you, you pull them out,” McClure says. “What you leave behind are the combinations that worked.”
