Attractive Ideas For Adding Texture To Your Landscaping
When it comes to landscaping for curb appeal, a simple lawn may not be enough. You can add splashes of color, especially with pretty flowers, and that's a step in the right direction. However, to give your yard real visual interest, you need texture as well. Choose plants and hardscaping that add texture to your landscape.
Ornamental Grasses
Perhaps the easiest way to add texture to your landscape is with ornamental grasses. These hardy plants once grew naturally on the plains, but now they've been cultivated for specific looks. For example, Better Homes and Gardens describes a prairie native, little bluestem, that's been cultivated to show gray-green blades that turn to orange, red and purple in the fall.
Ornamental grasses range in height from a few inches to several feet, so you can find many uses for them. For example, you could use a variety of taller ones as a privacy screen for your patio. Alternatively, consider using mid-size colorful varieties, such as little bluestem and variegated red fountain grass, as a border for your yard or pathway.
Architectural Plants
Another method for adding texture is with architectural plants and flowers. These are taller plants with geometric construction. Some popular varieties include the following:
- Giant elephant ear: grows up to eight feet tall with heart-shaped leaves.
- Sea holly: grows up to six feet tall with blue, feathery cone blooms.
- Allium aflatunense: grows up to three feet tall with dense, four-inch globes of blooms.
- Foxglove: grows to six feet tall with rows of tubular flowers.
You can use architectural plants as a garden focal point. For example, plant two or three giant elephant ears, and surround them with colorful groundcover plants such as hosta. You could use these as a screen, too, say by planting some of the taller varieties of foxglove in a row and tucking a bench behind them.
Dry Creek Bed
Hardscaping is also attractive for adding texture to your gardening. For instance, landscaping rock ranges from the finest grains of sand to giant boulders, so you have a large variety of options. One option is using small river rocks to create a dry creek bed. Place them in a gentle curve, arranging the rocks in a natural pattern. This could be the focal point of a rock garden. You could plant a mixture of architectural plants and groundcover to finish your rock garden.
Textural landscaping has the added bonus of looking attractive year-round, so add this beauty to your yard. Talk to a landscaping service for more help.
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