Plant The Look - Olympic Silver

This week, let's celebrate our Silver Medal-winning Olympic athletes with a deep dive into silver-coloured plants. There's a surprisingly high number of these plants - and our blog Plant The Look - Silver Leaved Plants explores the many reasons why the plant world often chooses to wear silver.

 

Silver-leaved plants come in three main flavours

• soft and furry, the better to cope with bright hot sun
• tough and leathery, to hold in precious moisture in arid climates
• glossy and shiny, to bounce back light in dark jungles

Silver leaf plants are the masters of resilience, developing clever adaptations to thrive in harsh environments!

 

Soft Silver Leaved Plants

If you're looking for tactile planting that's soft-to-touch, then silver-leaf hedging is the answer.
Perfect for sensory gardens, bordering a pathway, planting where children play.

Shown, clockwise from top left :

• Is there a softer, more strokable, plant than Stachys, or lamb's ears? It also gets called bunny's ears, and we've heard it compared to a beagle's ears too! It's a ripper stress reliever in a sensory garden, as well as growing without complaint in poor dry soils.
• Silver bush is aptly named; a gorgeous sunloving shrub with white umbrella flowers and silky-velvet leaves that you can't help but stroke.
• Native Rhagodia salt bush shimmers in shades of grey; but this variety, Silver Border, is the silveriest. We photographed salt bush varieties next to each other on the product page, so you can see the difference.
• The ultra-silver shrub has to be native cushion bush , Leucophyta, so bright and shiny it's almost a space-age sculpture.

Silver-leaved plants pair well with bright yellow and gold, for a very modern feeling.

Our post Plant The Look : Ultimate Grey & Illuminating explores ways to create this fashion forward palette in your own garden. All four plants below will love a bright sunny spot - it's what they were born for.

Shown, clockwise from top left :

• Our native Eremophila or emu bush has many varieties with pure silver-grey leaves, suede-soft to the touch. Most flower in bright fluro lemon yellow, a striking combination : look for Kalbarri Carpet, Blue Horizon, and Silver Ball for strong silver colour.
• Silver leaf gazania has soft slender leaves, and vivid highlighter-yellow daisy flowers - smaller than the multicoloured gazanias but no less eyecatching. It's generous with those flowers too. If you're hanging out for big daisies, choose gazania Talent Mix - soft silver foliage covered in jumbo-sized flowers of pink, orange, yellow, cream and plum.
• Mediterranean favourite lavender cotton, Santolina, has super-small silver leaves - and surprise golden button flowers in summer.
• Some love it, some hate it, as it can be a little aromatic in an enclosed garden - but there's no denying when you want silver in your borders, curry plant is hard to beat. It's easily clipped to tidy shapes or stepover hedging.

It's not only shrubs that bring out the soft silvery shades in the garden. There are several trailing and spreading plants that work the look in style.

 

Shown, clockwise from top left :

• Dainty Silver Falls creates a river of tiny silver coins when planted up high - in a hanging basket, or over a balcony edge. It works great planted as a groundcover too, threading its way through taller plants.
• Suede-soft licorice plant spreads wide to form a low dome of pale grey; pair it with similar-sized dark purple Loropetalum Purple Pixie for borders full of yin-yang drama.
• For dry sunny rockeries, succulent Senecio chalk sticks and Blue Falls can't be beat for low-maintenance high style.
• Slipping in to the smallest of spaces, the delicately airy chain of hearts, each tiny silver-charm leaf threaded onto slender wine-dark laces.

 

Tough Silver Leaved Trees

In fact, if you love a silver-grey look to your garden, there's heaps of choice - whether that's small shrubs, trailing groundcovers, or here, small trees.

 

Shown, clockwise from top left :

• Wattles are usually green of leaf, with a couple of notable exceptions. Queensland silver wattle is a beaut wattle, shimmery silver with bright yellow flowers.
  Look out too for cootamundra wattle; the 'plain' species form is a subtle blue-silver, while its purple wattle sibling goes all-out, mixing shades of purple, plum, and steel-grey with silver for a fabulous contrast.
• Many Eucalyptus - native gum trees - are always worth a second look when it comes to foliage colour; many are prized by florists worldwide for their lovely leaves. There's heaps of silver gums that will grow happily in a subtropical climate.
  We like gungurru or Silver Princess ; red-flowered ironbark; mountain gum Baby Blue, and shown, silver dollar, shine the brightest.
  The final boss of silver gums is arguably west coast native mottlecah or bush rose - huge hand-sized leaves in bright grey create the perfect backdrop to its big fluffy red flowers and white gumnuts. It doesn't do well in the east coast humidity of our nursery so we offer this one in seed form only.
• If you're outside the top end tropics, you can't go past Mediterranean olive for silvery colour in an elegant form. They grow well in pots, and can live for centuries - fruits are not always guaranteed, but you will get a gorgeous plant for your garden.
  Olives Piccolo and Tolley's have the brightest leaf colour; Spanish Manzanillo and Greek Kalamata the best fruits.
• At first glance , native silver banksia seems strangely named, when compared to the other showy silver plants featured here. Wait a while, and when the sea breezes blow, you'll see the leaves lift up to reveal their shimmery hidden surface, like the satin lining of a sober suit. Coastal banksia knows the same trick too.

Planting a new hedge or tree can be a longer term commitment, although you will see the silver leaves even at tubestock size.
Meanwhile, you can add stunning silver winners to your borders with these faster-growing grassy plants.

Shown, clockwise from top left :

• Blue fescue has fine steel-blue leaves in a rounded tuft, and if you want to amp up the silver, choose variety Elijah Blue
• Lomandra Frosty Top shares fescue's steel-blue shade and slender leaf in a much bigger size; they look great planted alongside each other
• Not true silver, but definitely showy, Miscanthus silver grass shimmery feathery plumes tower over your garden border, catching the sunlight
• Also not strictly silver, variegated society garlic - but planted en masse, you'd never know it. Bonus lilac flowers complement the cool colour perfectly.

Here's two of our favourite silver groundcovers to plant alongside those grassy plants above.

Shown, clockwise from top left :

• Heuchera Silver Gumdrop shines as brightly as a jeweller's window in shades of silver, platinum, gunmetal. Heuchera are little known, but if you want bright border plants for sun and shade, that look good with little effort, they're a great choice.
• Cyclamen are popular plants for indoors and out for their flamboyant orchid-like flowers in shades of vibrant pink and white. Tear your eyes away for a moment and notice the beautiful heart-shaped leaves, marked with metallic bands.

Glossy Silver Leaved Plants

Shown, clockwise from top left :

• If we're talking silver, you can't get more silver than a real life dinky-di sparkly plant! Fairytale watermelon peperomia twinkles when the light hits it, as if it's sprinkled with stardust. Rex begonias are known for their amazingly colourful large leaves; sometimes those colours include silver - as with varieties Plum Paisley , Arctic Breeze, and super-shiny Looking Glass here.

Shown, clockwise from top left :

• Alocasia Silver Dragon is one of those wishlist instagram favourite diva plants that photographs like a supermodel and is about as demanding to look after. Worth it though - those leaves are awesome!
• Easier to care for, bromeliad Silver Plum - bold and chunky, but not too big for pots and decks, it's magnificently metallic above and deep plum below.
• Super shiny and silver, philodendron Silver Sword looks glamorous and exotic yet is relatively easy-going to grow indoors. It likes a mist spray every now and then to keep the humidity up.
• Same goes for the lush and leafy Grey Star Ctenanthe, which needs warmth and humidity and shade from direct sun. You can see our reception plant on the product page

 

So you see, to give your garden glamour, sparkle, and stylish good looks, pick silver-leaved plants for your team.

They work well together, look dramatic paired with dark-leaved plants, and thrive in sunny hot spaces. Add orange and yellow flowers for zesty pops of colour, or keep things modern and clean with all-white.

Silver plants are winners!