This summer’s heat has been punishing for so many of our perennials. Even I got tired of my constant complaining, so I headed out to the garden to see if anything could actually be thriving in the inferno.
Spotted Spurge tops the list. Robust specimens of this tenacious mat-forming thug with a 12-inch spread have popped up everywhere.
In second place, but gaining rapidly, Field Bindweed has taken over my chronically sorry-excuse for a back lawn and could be headed down the alley to invade Franklin Park.
It’s enough to make a grown gardener cry.
Yet I couldn’t help but notice that perennials with silver foliage seemed to be flourishing, looking happy and right at home in the unrelenting heat.
Some of the most dazzling plants around, they’re also some of the toughest. After all, they evolved in the dry, sun-drenched, areas of the world, including North America’s mountains, steppes and deserts. Here, the green tones of wetter landscapes have been replaced by shimmery grays and silvers.
Plants from those parts are equipped with leaves covered with tiny hairs that reflect solar radiation. Not only do they cool the surface of the leaf by several degrees, but they offer protection from desiccating winds. The density, color, and length of each hair give each leaf its distinctive hue. Plants can appear gray- or blue-green, pewter, silver or even ghostly white. As a further adaptation, these leaves are often thin, needle-like, or filigreed, reducing the plant’s surface area and yielding less water loss than for plants with big, wide leaves.
Many, including the Mediterranean’s silvery sages, artemesias, and lavenders, have highly aromatic foliage, another adaptation helping them stand up to strong sun and long, dry summers. In the heat, the oil in their leaves becomes volatile, producing something like a protective fog around the vulnerable leaf surfaces.
If this current summer has made you interested in xeriscaping, a landscaping method that uses drought-resistant plants and water saving techniques, try some plants with silver foliage. Like any other plants, they’ll require some irrigation in the first year or two, while the root systems they need to pull water from deep within the soil become established.
They’re low-maintenance, but not maintenance-free. You’ll still need to weed, prune, divide and tidy, but the reward is exuberant beauty in the garden when the mercury climbs and everything else is wilting.
Stachys byzantina — Lamb’s Ears is probably the best known silver foliage plant, and the sage-gray cultivar “Helene von Stein” is on my “Top 10 Perennials” list. “Primrose Heron,” with smaller leaves that look like they were cut from thick chartreuse flannel, is also lovely. Both varieties rarely bloom, which is a good thing, because it’s all about the foliage, which is sweetly aromatic. Lamb’s Ears’ soft, furry leaves grow up to 8 inches high and spread out as far as you allow them. All that wooliness offered protection from the searing sun of its native Middle Eastern home. Despite all the downiness, this is one tough perennial. Best used as an accent or filler at the front of the border, it looks spectacular in a wide variety of garden styles.
Artemisia — This huge plant family includes our native sagebrushes, and members are prized for their lacy and highly aromatic foliage. “Powis Castle” grows up to 3 feet high and spreads almost as wide, a dense clumper of finely cut silver. “Valerie Finnis,” at 2 feet, has leaves soft as velvet. “Seafoam” is grown for its curlicue silver foliage and low, mounding habit, making it useful as a groundcover at the front of the garden. “Silver Brocade,” another ground-hugger, weaves itself, like white lace, through neighboring plants.
Salvia — “S. argentea” is a biennial with enormous candelabras of white-hooded flowers rising from rosettes of downy silver leaves. “Berggarten,” a culinary sage with round gray leaves, is loved by cooks for its fine flavor. Gardeners love it for its foliage and beautiful blue flowers and use it as an ornamental edger. This one grows into a low, compact mound 12-inches tall and 18-inches wide.
Eryngium amethystinum — If you’ve had your fill of soft, touchable silvers, bring on the bristly barbs of amethyst sea holly. Thistle-like flower heads of metallic blue are surrounded by 2-inch silvery-blue bracts and top tall stems in summer, emerging from a rosette of spiny, deeply cut, gray-green leaves.
There are many other worthy silver possibilities, so visit one of our local nurseries for more great suggestions.
For more gardening information, links, and photographs, visit the Yakima Master Gardener Column Website: https://tinyurl.com/mg-columns.
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Barany In the Garden: Silver foliage can beat the heat - Yakima Herald-Republic
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