Plants with silvery leaves always attract attention: and wild plants that occur in nature, during hikes on their native land, and garden plants that have already settled in our cottages or waiting for their turn in the list of future plantings.
The group, conventionally called silver-leaf plants, included species, forms and varieties with whitish, blue-bluish, gray-green leaves. In contrast to the rich tones they look not so “heavy”.
Some white-gray color of the leaves creates a thick pubescence:
- sage;
- cineraria seaside;
- bieberstein’s Jasper;
- maquis;
- Cynara;
- Teucrium white-felt;
- long-leaf mint;
- Stachys Byzantine and others.
The leaves of others are covered with bluish wax protective coating:
- Echeveria;
- some Sedum;
- hosts;
- Euphorbia;
- white cabbage;
- rutabaga;
- Japanese radish;
- onions and drooping;
- garlic and others.
Successful use of the silver color of the plants in the compositions allows you to create a variety of effects. Sometimes even ordinary plants add a real touch of aristocracy to the palette of the flower garden. Compact types, shapes and varieties are excellent candidates for creating curbs and clear lines in flower beds.
Without them, you can not do in a complex, rich types of mixborders, where silver and silvery-gray colors smooth out poorly matched color spots.
Properly arranged plants with bluish leaves look great and expensive.
Presenting today silvery plants, I picked up a pair of them, similar in appearance or kinship: species from one genus, varieties of one species and so on.
Cynara
This couple silver dekorativnolistvennyh perennials, perhaps the most beautiful.
Cynara scolymus and C. cardunculus are interesting for their large pinnately dissected leaves collected in a large outlet.
These are focal plants that focus on themselves throughout the growing season. Additional decoration during the flowering period are large blue, blue-purple inflorescences-baskets, which look beautiful on the background of silver leaves. The bottoms of the baskets of both kinds, a famous vegetable delicacy.
Cynara like Sunny open places with well-drained soils, do not like transplants. Perfectly fit into the rockeries, they can arrange a path, put in a flower garden, on the edge of a low retaining stone wall, from which their large carved leaves will be effectively hung.
The best neighbors for Cynara – he likes: Helichrysum arenarium or Helichrysum, Stachys, sage. Bright accents in such a company will add knifofiya, bearded irises.
Cabbage with bluish and bluish-green leaves
These varieties now have cabbage, K. broccoli, Brussels K. K. Chinese, K kohlrabi, K. sheet.
Cabbage prefer highly fertile loose non-acid soils. They are good in mixborders, in flower beds, in the curb along the track. Not only designers, but also ordinary vacationers are increasingly adopting them in a mixed planting flower beds, garden beds.
Crambe seaside
Fans bluish plants and gourmet who prefer savory dishes of edible wild plants, to taste the “seaweed” growing on the land.
Crambe Maritime, perhaps the most spectacular of its kind. Besides him in culture meets C. steveniana and C. tataria. All of them are edible and medicinal plants.
All our catamarans like open Sunny places. Crambe Maritime is more moisture-loving than its relatives, an ideal place for its landing – the coastal zone of the reservoir, or the lowland of rockery with more moist soils.
To be continued…