Garden trends - A fashion for foliage

Garden designers have been busy predicting trends for 2020 with large leafed plants and bolder colours anticipated to become increasingly popular.  We asked leading Garden Designer Barbara Samitier (MSGD) for her thoughts on how to inject more lush foliage and warmer colour into our gardens

 ‘I love Euphorbia mellifera which has a nice shape, an amazing honey scent and fits easily into different schemes,’ says Barbara.  ‘Melianthus is a bit tender but is another wonderful foliage plant with grey green serrated leaves.’
 
Barbara also suggests ferns, tree ferns, acanthus (mollis and spinosus) and fatsia (including a new more airy Fatsia polycarpa) as good architectural plants that make the connection with English gardens.  The key to avoiding these plants looking too jungly and out of place in English gardens, Barbara believes, is to layer them with ornamental grasses, herbaceous planting, sub shrubs and under planting of bulbs and ground cover.