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LET’S BE HONEST. Doesn’t your garden bore you sometimes?
Even healthy roses, ripe tomatoes and fragrant sweet peas can add up to a garden scene that isn’t wholly satisfying. Or maybe your place is a shady one, rich with leafy hostas and woodland wonders, yet it all seems a little … dull?
I think gardens bore us when they’re just too darn sweet. We aim for pretty, and we end up with pretty insipid. You can put up with only so much pastel ruffliness before your eye craves contrast. Lilies are so much more glorious when played against a backdrop of contorted or dark-leafed plants. Fluffy cottage gardens are more compelling when spiky yuccas or ebony succulents are thrown into the flowery mix.
The most fascinating and memorable gardens express the yin and yang of nature, the dark and the light, the lovely and the … weird, startling, even scary. Nature is about beauty, health and life, but it’s also full of darkness and decay. How else to explain the popularity of Amy Stewart’s little book “Wicked Plants,” with its tales of plant atrocities and poisonings?
You can counteract all the pretty shades of chartreuse, pink, yellow and blue by injecting a little wickedness into your garden. Whole categories of plants balance out nature’s sunny beauty.
Here are some candidates from the dark side, sure to add a satisfying, moody new dimension to your garden scene.
● Carnivores: Nothing creates an atmosphere of pleasant foreboding like a few meat-eating plants. The tall, elegantly veined throats of pitcher plants (Sarracenia spp.) almost disguise their eager mouths, but just peek in to see flies and spiders succumbing to the digestive juices of these ferocious American wildflowers. The scalloped hood partly shielding the stem keeps victims from escaping. Pitcher plants are easy to grow; the purple pitcher (S. ‘Purpurea’) is especially hardy because it’s native north into Canada. Sundews and Venus flytraps are nearly as hardy and equally atmospheric.
● Contortionists: Wildly twisting shrubs and trees evoke a dark, windy autumn day, or perhaps Halloween spookiness. Corokia cotoneaster ‘Little Prince’ is a subtle shadow of a plant that looks more like a snarl of gray witch’s hair than anything living. Robinia pseudoacacia ‘Twisty Baby’ is a small locust tree with crooked stems and beguiling curly leaves. Fantastically gnarled Harry Lauder’s walking stick (Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’) was all the rage at this year’s Northwest Flower & Garden Show, adding a distinct presence to many of the gardens.
● Pointy/Thorny: Sharply bladed yuccas and phormiums add a decidedly spiky element to the garden. Then there are the seriously prickly plants, like ghost brambles (Rubus biflorus) with snow-white canes arching 6 feet high. Miss Wilmott’s Ghost (Eryngium giganteum) has pale, jagged flowers. But if it’s sharp you’re looking for, check out the spiky malevolence of the wingthorn rose (Rosa sericea pteracantha) with nasty, blood-red thorns that are more a feature than its flowers.
● Dark and Dangerous: These plants aren’t really dangerous, but their shadowy tones add a touch of goth to the garden. You can find most everything in near-black these days, from tiny violas such as ‘Molly Sanderson’ to the daylily ‘Sweet Hot Chocolate’ and even a bittersweet-toned dahlia called ‘Karma Choc.’ Whether tucked into pots or lining walkways or beds, the shiny blades of black mondo grass add a note of year-round darkness to any garden scene. Or plunge fearlessly into the dark side with dragon arum, aka voodoo lily (Dracunculus vulgaris), which smells and looks as if it’s born of the devil. Really, this plant is disgusting, with black-red hooded flowers and a long, skinny black tongue. A single voodoo lily in all its rank glory is enough to counteract the sweetness of an entire bed of pastel roses.
Celebrate nature’s less obvious charms with a few of these plants that jolt us out of our complacency as to what’s beautiful and what isn’t. Seriously weird plants express nature in all her dimensions, not just her fenced-in, bought-in-a-pot predictability.
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