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Plants with Deep Burgundy or Purple-black Foliage |
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Like most gardeners I like the contrasts in my garden. Plants with unusual or striking features make an interesting addition, especially when the foliage is what makes them striking. I particularly like this because with perennials they are not always in flower but striking foliage will make a statement all season. For this reason I have a number of Heuchera, Japanese Painted Ferns and variegated varieties of Jacobs Ladder and Iris’ etc.
I recently saw an interesting use of some of these plants and more besides. It was a lovely urn or pot in a rich charcoal color planted entirely with plants that had purple-black foliage. It was extremely dramatic, and had a black stone as a feature to accent it. Set up against a door of deep magenta the pot looked fabulous. I immediately thought of some variations on the theme. A ceramic pot in dark maroon would also work well, one just need to use their imagination.
So of course I intend to check the end of season sales for a really unique pot to plant something up along this line next spring.
The whole idea had me checking out plants on the internet with dark foliage and so here are some of the beauties that I came up with.
One of my favorite finds was purple leaf peppers, or capsicum annuum. Black Pearl is an ornamental pepper that has glossy leaves that are so dark that in some lights they look black. It gets round black pearls of fruit that ripen to bright red and is extremely showy. It can be purchased thro Pan America and other seed catalogues.
But there are lots of other easily purchased plants such as Purple Millet, or Purple Fountain grass, the millets foliage starts out green but matures to a deep bronzy purple with dark chocolate brown flowers that resemble small bull rushes. The grass’s flowers are tan and purplish-red.
Purple basil, chocolate hybrid Begonia, chocolate ruffle Heuchera and Coleus also have wonderful deep dark foliage. The coleus especially has a large variety of intense colors to choose from.
Impomea or ‘sweet potato vine has a couple of varieties that would work including Ace of Spades.
Hibiscus Eetveldianus or Maple Sugar plant is another great choice. The leaves look like small maple leaves and ‘Jungle Red’ has lovely intensely rich foliage.
Musa {Ensete} Maurelii or ‘Abyssinian Black Banana” is another interesting plant I would like to find; lovely foliage.
Acalypsia, Colocasia Esculentas Jet Black Wonder or Trandescantia ‘spiderworts’ purple queen or purple heart would also work.
I can hardly wait.
I hope I have given you some interesting ideas to think about.
Lindi Karmason
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