A Live-in Garden (continued)
On Vashon Island in Puget Sound, nursery owners Sylvia Matlock and Ross Johnson’s sleek mini-house melds seamlessly into the dramatic foliage of their woodland garden.
Photo: John Granen
What the Pros Know
A satisfying year-round garden depends on foliage. Whether planting in pots or in the ground, Matlock emphasizes texture and contrast rather than flower or color. She creates leafy drama by using oversized architectural plants to play with the scale of the garden. She looks for sharp, spiky, fluffy, wavy, variegated and shiny-leafed plants, then mixes them fearlessly, green on green, silver on silver, for tone-on-tone effects. Her favorite foliage plants for garden theatrics include canna lilies, yuccas, mahonias, euphorbias, sedum, Melianthus major and Begonia grandis. In Vashon Island’s Zone 8 climate, most of these plants are hardy, although Matlock overwinters tender perennials and annuals like echeveria, aoenium and some euphorbias in her conservatory. At last count, she has 177 pots, planted one kind of plant per pot for maximum foliar impact. And she often places additional unplanted pots in the garden for their strong sculptural presence and to emphasize the foliage around them.
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