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Your Home & Garden, August 1998 We’ve heard about hugging trees, but what about feeling plants? Dennis Greville gets in touch with Texture Plants and finds a “blast” of a nursery. Colour and scent are both important in gardening, but shape and texture really bring it all to life. When you’re deciding what to plant, do you ever consider the texture and sculptural form of plants before you choose?
By carefully mixing the rough with the smooth, the bold with the delicate or even juxtaposing spiky plants with lush succulents, you can add drama, tension and interest to what would otherwise be a rather ordinary garden solution. Colour is often used to add interest to the garden, but without clear form and texture to bounce off, colour becomes weak and ineffective. By choosing plants with both form and texture, colour comes alive and contrasts of light and dark add depth, volume and power to the garden.
A Special Place
Until recently, such plants were hard to find. Now, some nurseries are beginning to specialise in plants that have these strong sculptural and textural qualities. I recently stumbled upon one near Prebbleton, just south of Christchurch. I spotted a sign advertising a nursery called Texture Plants and always keen to discover a new nursery, I paid a visit.
What a blast it was! A plant person’s paradise! Here were many hard-to-find plants that I had been after for years. Not only were they infinite in variety, shape, texture, colour, and form, but they were also exceptional quality and reasonably priced. Plant after plant drew my attention. Succulents with striking leaves, cacti in a myriad of forms, wonderful grasses such as Carex, Festuca glauca and Helictotrichon. Hebes such as macwannii and precoides nana dazzled with their intensity.
Some Sempervivums had been planted in tuffa pots by an artist in Greytown, near Wellington, which added to the sculptural quality of these handsome plants. There were Yuccas, Dracaenas, Echiverias, Aloe saponaria and Dudleya virens. The beautiful Pachyphyllum or moon stones, Agave medio-picta, Cycads, Aloe plicatilis, jade trees, seedlings – all, as the nursery name says, with wonderful textural qualities.
Here were sculptural plants of every shape, size and colour and perennials for the garden, as well as Helleborus lividus and the Joy hybrids. Salvia aethiopsis, a dry-loving plant, drew my attention. I became entranced by a beautiful native geranium, a native Dracophyllum and some new Hostas with unlikely names such as Striptease, Great Expectations and Patriot.
The owners of the enterprise are brothers Tim and Hamish Prebble, helped by Mary Carnegie. Their enthusiasm for plants was contagious and their knowledge and expertise humbling. I remark on the beautiful Rhammus variegata. “Nicer than a Pitto” says Tim, “great for hedging, and red berries down the stem…When does it berry, Mary?” Tim calls out. “Late September and October” comes back her quick reply. I meet Hamish’s iris collection, Hebe mrs pringle and the wet-loving skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus).
“We enjoy collecting plants,” the brothers concur. “We really did not want to be a mainstream nursery; we wanted to have exciting stuff and to provide quality plants.” |
