Tropical foliage imposters add beautiful contrast

Gardens thrive with contrast. Bold foliage next to fine foliage is almost always a winning combination. A garden full of mid-sized foliage doesn’t challenge the eye, even if it is full of flowers. That’s where tropicals come in handy. Few plants are better at adding contrast to a garden than tropicals.

The broad leaves of bromeliads, the giant and often colorful foliage of Colocasia and the sheer immenseness of red Abyssian banana (Ensete maurelli) cannot be beat for providing incredibly contrast in the garden.

But when you’re growing them, they are far from a perfect solution. Plants can be expensive or difficult to source and all require special winter care unless you plan to grow them as annuals, which, given the first point, is a tough pill to swallow.

Wisconsin gardeners can call into service a good selection of hardy plants that offer the bold foliage of a tropical plant but are far easier to grow year after year.

Most gardeners are probably growing one of the best tropical foliage imposters already. Hostas come in a wide range of leaf shapes and sizes, but the biggest leafed varieties are among the best plants to provide contrast. ‘Sum and Substance,’ ‘Blue Angel’ and ‘Empress Wu’ are a few easy-to-find varieties that fit the bill. In our climate, many varieties can be pushed into a part-sun location so long as they have sufficient water, but hostas generally do best in a filtered light or part-shade location.

Shade-loving Ligularia is another foliage standout. ‘Britt Marie Crawford’ is an excellent purple-leafed variety, but some Japanese varieties, including Ligularia x yoshizoeana ‘Palmatiloba,’ were noted as excellent performers in the Chicago Botanic Garden’s trials.

For a true jungle feel, Japanese butterbur (Petasites japonicus) can be grown in moist to wet soil and in part to full shade, such as along a woodland stream. Emerging as an almost alien-looking flower, enormous leaves more than 2 feet across look like they’d be at home on the shores of the Amazon River. It should be planted carefully as it spreads quickly by rhizomes and never mistaken for the truly invasive common butterbur (Petasites hybridus).

In the sun, a few native prairie plants come through in the bold foliage department. Prairie dock (Silphium terebinthinaceum) sports 18 by 12-inch-long leaves with a rough texture that should ward off deer and rabbits. Stems that carry yellow flowers rise a towering 9 feet. It will reseed readily in the right conditions, so remove the flowers before they set seed.

Giant coneflower (Rudbeckia maxima) has a similar appearance with slightly smaller, silvery-blue foliage. Like prairie dock, it should be grown in full sun and is an excellent source of food for pollinators and birds.

If you’re growing any of these for the foliage — and it’s really the very best reason to grow them — and the flower don’t suit you, leave a few for the wildlife and cut the rest off. Then position them next to finer-textured plants for a dynamic design that will return year after year.