Garden Designers Roundtable talks art today. A discussion of art in the garden can go in so many directions: Plants as art. Homemade garden art. Making sure your art is the proper scale for the site. Child-safe installation of heavy sculpture. Functional garden art. What is art? Entire books could be—and have been—written about using art in the garden, but since this is just one post I’m going to focus on harmonizing your art with your garden.

First, however, I do want to spell out my three very strict rules about using art in the garden. Ready?
1. Display what you love.
2. Use what you have. Make your own art! Why not?
3. Less is more. Except when more is more. You know which type you are—go for it! Art is a personal expression.

Easy, right? And no matter what kind of garden art you gravitate toward, finding the perfect spot for it—or making the perfect spot for it—is easy when you harmonize it with the plants or hardscape in your garden. Let’s look at some fun examples.

Play up a theme

In this Asheville, North Carolina, vegetable garden, flowers made of forks and spoons are a sly accompaniment to the salad greens.

So are salad plates “growing” among the chard, as seen in Lucinda Hutson’s Austin garden.

Lucinda also has a mermaid-themed garden, in which this iron mermaid is paired with coral-shaped succulents and Sanseveria to create an under-the-sea garden scene.

Echo the texture of plants or hardscape in your art

In Helen Yoest’s Raleigh garden, green ivy scales the brick wall of her house, echoing the pattern of scales on the metal fish that hangs there.

Likewise, a stone Buddha head matches the texture of the limestone wall behind it in Jeff Pavlat’s Austin garden. It’s almost as if the rock has come to life.

Emphasize a plant’s shape or color by repeating it with garden art

This idea is masterfully illustrated in the Middleton Farm Garden in Dallas, where a vertically stacked pebble sculpture echoes the shape and color variation of black bamboo growing behind it.

A blue, spiky-haired figure echoes the spiky, blue leaves of an Agave ovatifolia in my own former garden.

Yellow and orange glass globes harmonize with the sunny leaves of Japanese forest grass in the Lane Garden in Seattle.

And a blue gazing globe reflects the blue stems and leaves of ‘Bath’s Pink’ dianthus in my current garden.

A white pot is a natural choice to brighten a shade garden, especially if you plant a white-variegated plant in front of it, as in the lovely Birrell Garden in Seattle.

Humorously riff on the nature of your plants with garden art

Art can be beautiful, colorful, eye-catching, and thought-provoking, but it can also be funny. In my garden, a bottlebrush-style bottle tree, strategically placed, stands in for an agave bloom spike, which will not occur until the plant has reached the end of its life. I’m not in any hurry for that to occur, so it’s fun to enjoy this fantasy bloom spike until then.

And when I found this toothy, Audrey-style plant stake, I knew it’d be a perfect match with a similarly dangerous plant with “teeth”—in this case, a spiky Agave stricta. Feed me, Seymour!

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

Susan Cohan : Miss Rumphius’ Rules : Chatham, NJ

Jocelyn Chilvers : The Art Garden : Denver, CO

Mary Gallagher Gray : Black Walnut Dispatch : Washington, D.C.

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

Jenny Peterson : J Petersen Garden Design : Austin, TX

Deborah Silver : Dirt Simple : Detroit, MI

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

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.

Regular readers know that I often post about my own garden projects and my garden’s evolution. Heck, when I started blogging 6 years ago, that was the whole point. Today I have a good excuse for posting home-garden pics because it’s this month’s topic for Garden Designers Roundtable. It can be fun to see what garden designers are up to in their own gardens, especially high-end, design-build folks who install fabulous gardenscapes for their well-heeled clients and may do something creative and extravagant on their own back forty—if they’re one of the rare designers who gets paid at that level.

That’s not me, though, nor 99% of the designers I know. I’m a do-it-yourselfer (or hire-it-yourselfer) with a limited budget, just like most of my clients. I have a wish list for my own garden, and I’ve checked off a few projects during the 3-1/2 years we’ve lived in our current house, and I’ve put a lot of sweat equity into the garden. But my list still contains the bigger projects I dream of, mostly involving wall building or patio roofing—expensive projects that will just have to wait until the piggy bank is fuller. So, without further ado, here are a few before-and-after shots of my garden, which is always “in progress,” just like yours, I imagine.

Before: A small lawn surrounded by live oaks occupied the middle level of our back yard when we moved in.

After: I laid a sunburst stone path that radiates out from a stock-tank pond focal point, with new garden beds under the trees and a shed built by my handy husband to hide the swimming pool mechanicals.

Before: We were fortunate to inherit limestone-faced raised beds along the back of the house, but they were a mishmash of scrawny and overgrown plants when we moved in. I pulled out everything and added several inches of good soil.

After: Now it’s a crazy jungle of spiky and variegated plants that I love.

Before: Slippery grass led down a steep slope on both sides of the back yard. I’d already started adding beds when this picture was taken, and we’d recently installed a wood fence in front of a patchy redtip photinia hedge, gaining privacy.

After: A crushed-gravel path edged in free rock from the local cemetery, with drought-tolerant beds on either side, makes a safe, pretty passage through the garden.

Before: Looking up the other grassy slope in the side yard, a fence blocked the view, and those fantastic boulders were wasted, just sitting in the lawn.

After: A crushed-gravel path provides no-slip footing, and I moved the fence up-slope, closer to the street, to gain more back-yard space. New beds and the path flow around the boulders, giving them natural presence.

Before: Out front, Asian jasmine and star jasmine carpeted a live oak berm in the center of the circular drive. Easy-care but boring.

After: A new deer-resistant, drought-tolerant garden is still filling in. The blue, green, and gold garden contains ‘Color Guard’ yucca (Y. filamentosa ‘Color Guard’), softleaf yucca (Y. recurvifolia), gopher plant (Euphorbia rigida), Mexican feathergrass (Nassella tenuissima), Mexican oregano (Poliomintha longiflora), foxtail fern (Asparagus densiflorus ‘Meyersii’), bamboo muhly (Muhlenbergia dumosa), Texas dwarf palmetto (Sabal minor), heartleaf skullcap (Scutellaria ovata), ‘Sparkler’ sedge (Carex phyllocephala ‘Sparkler’), Turk’s cap (Malvaviscus drummondii), variegated Miscanthus grass, majestic sage (Salvia guaranitica), silver Mediterranean fan palm (Chamaerops humilis var. argentea), Artemisia ‘Powis Castle,’ copper canyon daisy (Tagetes lemmonii), spineless prickly pear (Opuntia), rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis), damianita (Chrysactinia mexicana), Lindheimer nolina (Nolina lindheimeri), and Texas nolina (Nolina texana). I usually also add annual ‘Senorita Rosalita’ cleome and red cordyline for long-season, drought-tolerant color.

Before: An expanse of St. Augustine grass out front

After: A new streetside garden, with a gravel parking strip in front and generous path behind, welcomes visitors at the curb, gives me a place to stroll through the garden, and eats up a whole lotta lawn.

Want to see what other designers around the country are doing in their own gardens? Please visit Garden Designers Roundtable for links to the other Roundtable participants, or click below:

Susan Morrison : Blue Planet Garden Blog : East Bay, CA

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

Mary Gallagher Gray : Black Walnut Dispatch : Washington, D.C.

Jocelyn Chilvers : The Art Garden : Denver, CO

Deborah Silver : Dirt Simple : Detroit, MI

Debbie Roberts : A Garden of Possibilities : Stamford, CT

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.