From garnet to merlot to mahogany to mulberry, there is something about the varying shades of burgundy that bring a certain sophistication to any garden it graces. Particularly in a landscape dominated by green foliage, infusing burgundy or dark purple into your landscape can create a moody, dramatic vibe that draws you into the space.
It is a fantastic color for any gardener’s toolkit, but it can be challenging to incorporate burgundy plants into your yard or garden. Keep reading to learn how to use varying shades of burgundy in your yard and landscape.
Adding Burgundy Plants to Your Yard & Garden
Burgundy and deep purple shades can add depth to your landscape, enhance shadows in your landscape, create contrast in your garden beds and act as a focal point. Here’s an in-depth look into how to make it happen and some of our favorite burgundy plants for the job.
Creating Contrast with Burgundy Plants
Most often, green foliage dominates our gardens and landscapes, so it’s nice to create a little bit of contrast not just with the flowers but with foliage. It’s a subtle way to create a striking dimension in your garden.
Cordylines are a gorgeous tropical plant species that produces spear-shaped, leathery leaves in various patterns and colors, many of which come in deep shades of burgundy. They can only be grown outdoors in zones 9 through 12, making them perfect for our gardens. Cordyline australis is a common cultivar with long, dark, narrow leaves. Cordyline terminalis is quite showy as well. Its foliage comes in various colors, including that dark red—almost black—hue, which can create just the right amount of contrasting foliage in your garden.
Do you want to create real drama and contrast? Offset your dark, burgundy plants with pale silver and white foliage by planting things like Dusty Miller (also known as silver ragwort) or Dichondra argentea ‘Silver Falls.’
Burgundy Plants as a Focal Point
Make a single burgundy or dark purple specimen the star of the show in an otherwise green garden bed; this will create a focus and central focal point in your yard. Euphorbia cotinifolia, often referred to as tropical smokebush or smoketree spurge, is a broadleaf tropical shrub native to South America and Mexico and thus hardy to zones 9 through 11. It has distinct, heart-shaped, burgundy-red leaves and purplish stems and is generally treated as a shrub, reaching about 10 to 15 feet high.
Highlight Bright Perennial Flowers with a Dark Backdrop
Using dark burgundy plants and foliage as a backdrop to brightly colored or pastel-hued flowers works well in garden beds and containers. Depending on the shade you choose, you can create a calming effect or even drama and excitement.
For example, burgundy verbena can act as a lovely backdrop in a container alongside the bright green foliage of lime sweet potato and pink pops of petunias. If you’re after that peaceful, calming vibe, opt for foliage with plum tones as a backdrop to Snowball hydrangeas’ pale blues, pinks, and grays, or creeping phlox.
Create A Burgundy Color Echo
Color echoes are about more than making sure that the flowers in your garden coordinate nicely. You create a color echo by bringing together two plants with a similar hue, in either the foliage or the blooms.
Even something as simple as the dark stamen of a Tiger Lily can subtly tune into burgundy petunia petals or the near chocolate purple hues of the foliage of a coleus plant. Go on an adventure in the garden center to track down some unsuspecting pairings. Once you start looking, the options are endless.
Burgundy plants offer a fun way to add depth and sophistication to your yard and garden. For more ideas on how to add burgundy to your Fort Lauderdale garden, pop by Living Color Garden Center to talk to one of our experts!