After a fall and winter of writing and compiling photos and a spring and summer of editing and proofreading, I’m thrilled to announce that my upcoming book, Lawn Gone! Low-Maintenance, Sustainable, Attractive Alternatives for Your Yard, has a beautiful cover design and is now available for pre-order. I’ve installed a handy app called Browse My Books on my book’s Facebook page (Lawn Alternatives—please “like” it to receive book updates and alt-lawn inspiration) that lets you order directly from various outlets, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and others.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to be on the brink of becoming a published author. And this opportunity would never have happened without YOU, dear reader—you and all who’ve read Digging over the years. Many thanks for your support, fellow Diggers!

Click here to pre-order Lawn Gone!

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Even the smallest vignettes benefit from strong contrasts of texture. Take this tabletop display, for example. The slick zinc tabletop contrasts with a nubby lace doily, and the spiny cactus contrasts with the smooth, ceramic pot.

If you use design techniques to bring greater interest to your garden, you may already know that employing contrast is a good way to achieve it: contrasting leaf and flower forms (globes versus narrow spires, for example), contrasting light and shadow (creating a tunnel of shade with a vine-covered arbor, leading to a sunlit garden), and contrasting colors (green and red, blue and orange) to amp up the excitement. But how often do you think about contrasting various textures in your garden?

Texture is visual and tactile; you can see and feel the relative roughness, smoothness, slickness, and furriness of leaves, stones, wood, even outdoor furniture—in fact, any feature of your garden. Maybe you’re not consciously considering the texture of particular elements in your garden, but I bet you notice it nonetheless. Don’t we all run our fingers across fuzzy leaves, feathery grasses, rough bark, satin petals, and smooth pebbles? It’s one of the pleasures of the garden! Even young children do this, and we never outgrow it.

Here are a few examples of how to contrast various textures in your central Texas garden.

Pair sword-like, spiky leaves with soft, billowy foliage, like this ‘Color Guard’ yucca mingling with copper canyon daisy (Tagetes lemmonii)…

…and the smooth, broad leaves of ‘Whale’s Tongue’ agave (A. ovatifolia) with the fine texture of Mexican oregano (Polomintha longiflora) and rock penstemon (Penstemon baccharifolius).

Plants aren’t the only things that add texture to a garden. Hardscape materials like stone, wood, and metal add a tremendous amount of texture. In this garden, owner Jeff Pavlat contrasts a pebbly bed of river stones with a smooth limestone patio and a water-slick millstone. You can practically feel the texture of this scene with your eyes!

Similarly, in my own former garden, I used rock to create textural contrast: a nubby arrangement of Mexican beach pebbles paired with smooth, flat limestone.

Consider the texture of decorative objects in your garden as well: slippery glazed-ceramic pots, rough terracotta, bamboo screens, rusty wrought-iron trellises, etc. I like to contrast the slick, smooth texture of galvanized steel—used here on the shed roof, the culvert-pipe planters, and the stock-tank pond—with rougher textures in the garden, like gravel and stone paving and large limestone boulders. The ridges in the steel also give it a touchable texture, even if you only “touch” them with your eyes.

Don’t you want to touch everything in this tactile driveway garden (Munsterman garden)? Smooth culvert-pipe planters and the smooth stems and leafy foliage of the bamboo planted in them; chunky Opuntia paddles and feathery dianthus foliage beneath; even the pebbly pea gravel—all invite the fingers and eyes to linger.

Gabion walls—steel-framed boxes filled with rocks—are trendy in gardens today, and they add a lot of texture as well. In this Marfa, Texas garden, chunky gabion walls contrast with smooth, concrete retaining-wall seating. Of course, the spiky globes of Yucca rostrata and their shaggy trunks add even more touchable texture to the scene.

I hope this has given you some ideas for contrasting texture in your own garden. If you sense a dullness about a particular planting bed, pay attention to whether the leaves all have the same texture, whether shiny, smooth, rough, or spiky. If so, try mixing it up a little and watch how contrasting textures brings new life to your garden.

This is my contribution to today’s post on Texture by Garden Designers Roundtable. Click for links to other designers’ posts from around the U.S. and England.

Thomas Rainer : Grounded Design : Washington, D.C.

Rebecca Sweet : Gossip In The Garden : Los Altos, CA

Lesley Hegarty & Robert Webber : Hegarty Webber Partnership : Bristol, UK

Douglas Owens-Pike : Energyscapes : Minneapolis, MN

Deborah Silver : Dirt Simple : Detroit, MI

David Cristiani : The Desert Edge : Albuquerque, NM

Christina Salwitz : Personal Garden Coach : Renton, WA

Andrew Keys : Garden Smackdown : Boston, MA

Rochelle Greayer : Studio G : Boston, MA

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Got a wall or fence that keeps getting tagged with graffiti, defacing and devaluing your property? Take heart—you could be on the front end of a trend toward using graffiti art in the garden. I’ve spotted graffiti-decorated walls and planter boxes in Austin and Dallas over the past year, and I think these gardeners are onto something.

Used intentionally (and sparingly), graffiti adds a hip, urban, and youthful—not to mention colorful—element to your garden decor. In Austin, the folks at Big Red Sun gave a pair of potted palms downtown curb appeal with “tagged” planter boxes.

These snippets of graffiti are reminiscent of pop art. The gritty look is enhanced by their low-tech security system of broken bottles affixed to the top of the wall, Mexican-style.

At East Side Succulents, the owners disguised a filing cabinet’s gray-industrial origins with spray-painted graffiti-style swirls. Simple, colorful, and fun, and they even color-coordinated their succulents to match.

The Blue Lotus garden in Dallas takes the concept to a higher level with their corrugated-steel “wall.” They commissioned this work of art from a local graffiti artist and asked him to render various elements from their travels and hometown. It makes an edgy, fun focal point in their garden.

I’m curious to see where this trend will pop up next. Are other areas of the country seeing it too? Are you a fan, or do you think graffiti should be relegated to boxcars and abandoned warehouses?

By the way, my blog Digging is a finalist for Best Gardening Blog in the Readers’ Choice Awards at About.com. I’d love to have your vote. You can vote once a day (it’s on a 24-hour cycle) until March 21. So vote early and often! Thanks for your support! (And thank you to Pamela Price for the vote graphic.) Click to VOTE.

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.