Garden Design Essentials: Texture

At least two senses engage when you bring texture into the landscape: touch and sight.

Marjorie Elliott Bevlin wrote in Design Through Discovery: The Elements and Principles, "Textures are so much a part of our environment that we generally take them for granted." Nothing could be truer outdoors. From smooth polished river rocks to thorny agave, everything has inherent texture. But texture is also visual — capturing light and shadow play against surfaces, lending depth, dimension, and definition through contrast.

Touch

Give your garden tactile quality by adding masses of soft, fuzzy, or feathery plants where ankles or hands brush against them. Touching velvety lamb's ears triggers pleasurable emotions.

Sight

The basic rule for visual texture: pair bold foliage with fine foliage. Or pair graphic plant forms with amorphous ones. Each reads more distinctly in juxtaposition. This works equally well with outdoor fabrics, container gardens, or dramatic borders viewed from distance.

Texture needn't be messy or busy. Challenge yourself to combine two key plants as a signature duo and repeat that pairing throughout for a sublime, sophisticated look.

Jeffrey Gordon Smith Landscape Architecture: As powerful as a black-and-white photograph, texture strikes when colors stay the same. Smooth cast-stone paver rests in same-hued pebbles — eye reads this as pleasing texture contrast. Soft feather grass adds surprising accent.

Debora Carl Landscape Design: Low-water design anything but dreary. Fabulous contrasting textures in a small space. Needle-fine blue fescue grasses as carpet beneath bold-shaped, red-tinged Kalanchoe (paddle plant). Similar cultivar: Kalanchoe thyrsiflora 'Bronze Sculpture'.

Debora Carl Landscape Design: Textural explosion in a container garden centered on dramatic variegated Aeonium with distinct flowerlike arrangement. Popular variegated form: Aeonium decorum 'Sunburst'. Narrow, small-leafed trailing succulents complement the sunny Aeonium center stage.

Studio H Landscape Architecture: One color, many textures. All-green planting illustrates how the eye reads textures in a single palette. Feathery papyrus stalks silhouetted against a retaining wall; rounded clipped-box shapes above have heavier volume. Different green textures create pleasing visual tension and balance.

Philpotts Interiors: Texture matters in outdoor furniture and fabrics. Graphic all-weather upholstery plays with huge bird of paradise foliage beyond the lanai. Bold impressions balanced by finely woven wicker seating and polished wood side table. An invitation to relax, feel breezes, enjoy the moment.

Molly Wood Garden Design: All foliage lush, green, textural; hardscape, pergola/awning, furniture upholstery white and satiny. Soothing backyard room. Only color from green shrubs/trees and turquoise accent pillows. Texture continues where smooth concrete walkway floats over gravel bed.

Huettl Landscape Architecture: Various textures and colors combine for a stunning vignette. Even without color, the eye reads textures — long slender lavender wands, threaded blue grass at Japanese maple base with burgundy palm-shaped leaves, threadlike golden conifer textures in front.

Don Ziebell: Favorite quote from Design Through Discovery (Bevlin): "Rough textures ... have a warmth about them that makes most people feel at ease — brick and stone, uneven wall surfaces, thick carpets, nubby draperies." This open-air living room exemplifies it. Rustic wood for fireplace mantel and exposed beams; woven wicker furniture, irregular brick pavers, mortared stone for fireplace and walls. All natural, comforting surfaces.

Tracy Stone AIA: Surface textures in this spa-like outdoor shower make it special. Deck of ironwood, smooth-trowel plaster walls, enclosure of recycled resin panels with embedded reeds. Privacy panel echoes nearby horsetail (Equisetum hyemale) planting — a nice textural touch.