Imagine you could only select 1 color (besides green) to enhance your garden. I’d want to add gray. Now, that might sound crazy considering the possible rainbow of hues, but gray is the best complement in almost any garden. This silvery tone works beautifully with green, and there is a huge assortment of plants with gray foliage to choose from. Restrict yourself to a single bloom color and your garden might be very boring indeed. Add layers of green and gray, and your garden will be interesting all year.
Genevieve Schmidt
If I could have only three colors in my garden, I would incorporate an orange or a red into the mixture of green and gray. This orange-red color lies round the color wheel out of this steel blue-gray, making both of those colours stick out.
Debora carl landscape layout
Best Colours With Gray Plants
All colors of orange work well with grays and blue-grays, including this yellowish orange. Consider putting a photo of gray everywhere you would like an orange-colored blossom to glow. You’ll be surprised by the comparison.
Donna Lynn – Landscape Designer
Vivacious magenta is just another classic pairing with gray. The 2 colours bring out each other’s blue tones.
Wake Up Your Garden With Magenta Magnificence
Timothy Sheehan, ASLA
Lighter pinks, colors of maroon, aubergine and even lipstick red are also great pairings with gray.
Donna Lynn – Landscape Designer
Consider using grey against aluminum accents. The two metallic tones complement one another and give a cool and refined look to any room. Slightly aged aluminum paired with gray plants is one of my absolute preferred mixes in the garden.
SP Gardens – Susanna Pagan Landscape Design
Designing a Garden With Gray Foliage
Gray provides a nice contrast and grounds bigger plants when it’s set around the foundation of a green tree or tree. A second layer of gray in a slightly different colour adds more texture and thickness.
CLK Construction
In precisely the same fashion, a foundation of gray encircling a small tree divides a sea of green here. The comparison draws the eye instantly to the focal point of this planting.
Colors Of Green Landscape Architecture
Consider using gray as an edging plant to place off bigger yellow-green plants. The comparison makes a specified line and lifts up the eye into the focal-point plant.
Colors Of Green Landscape Architecture
Great Gray Plants
Lamb’s ear is a prolific, spreading bear of a plant, but I still love it for its gray tones. Despite its soft, fuzzy leaves and ability to flourish in harsh locales, the color is the very best aspect of this plant.
Stout Design-Build
Consider using mounds of H’s ear to break up banks of green along a walkway, or even try making a pathway completely from H’s ear. Can you imagine how wonderful that would feel in your feet? Watch out when they bloom, however — the bees love them too.
Grays are fabulous for a shady garden, particularly in lighter colour. A painted fern or gray-leaf astilbe will light up a shady spot in your garden.
Glenna Partridge Garden Design
Whether you’re adding a tiny Sea Holly to cheer up a cottage garden, brightening up shady corners with silver standouts or accenting a path with gray foliage, then this subtle hue can make a giant effect.
Working in the background, it sets greens in relief from one another, brings out trendy tones in various colours and serves as a visually interesting component of the garden even when nothing is in bloom.
I can’t say enough about the advantages of a couple shades of gray in your garden. Perhaps you could even locate 50. Wouldn’t that make for a garden?
More: 6 Beautiful Silver-Leaf Plants