The Texture of Fall
As a kid, my parents took me to nature centers weekly. I loved reading the displays, watching the animals in the glass tanks, and listening to the guides tell us weird facts about the outside world. One thing that kind of thrilled me and freaked me out all at the same time was the inevitable box you stuck your hand in. You know, the ones where you stuck your hand through a hole and felt various objects trying to guess what they were? The exercise engaged your sense of touch based on the textures you felt. Similarly, the autumnal season before us brings texture center stage in the landscape around us.
We know texture embodies three basic forms, coarse, medium, and fine. Coarse things tend to be large, irregular, and rough. Small, consistent, and smooth describe fine textured objects and medium textures reside in between. Soils illustrate different texture types well. Coarse textured soils would be sand with relatively large particles. Clay would be the opposite and represents a fine textured soil, and silt is right in the middle. But if you’re like me who was rather bored with the topic of soils in college, you’d rather talk about other things in our gardens that bring us texture.
What sorts of botanical things bring us texture, especially in the autumn months? Foliage tops the list in my mind. Leaves turn colors and become crispy and then brittle (don’t you just love walking with their crunch underfoot). The shapes they started with all break down and become pieces of confetti. Spent flowers shed their petals and their flower heads bob on top of sturdy stems. Echinacea dots the perennial border with up-side-down exclamation marks. Wispy Astilbe stands like a display of paintbrushes at an artist’s studio. Hydrangea hangs like tufts of cotton candy. These spent flowers give way to fruit and seeds. The seed pods of butterfly milkweed and Asclepias tuberosa present a rather coarse texture. But when they open, the featherlike seeds fly away like fly fishing lures. And berries droop in clusters creating tapestries of textural patterns.
These different textures evoke different emotions for us as we interact with them. Naked trees make me melancholy and sad as they point to the winter ahead. Yet the bright purple fruit of Beautyberry energizes me by the contrast it creates. And I can’t explain it, but chunky, bumpy pumpkins make me clap my hands with glee. Mostly though, autumnal textures soothe me. I could get hypnotized by the thin stranded ornamental grasses dancing with the wind. Or the threadlike Amsonia waving and spinning about.
If you’re looking to play with some texture in your own garden space, here are a few of my favs:
Stonecrop Sedum (multiple species and varieties)
Yarrow — Achillea millefolium
Coneflower — Echinacea
Blue Star — Amsonia
Butterfly Milkweed — Asclepias tuberosa
Ornamental Grasses — Calamagrostis, Panicum, Sporobolus, Miscanthus,
Hydrangea — Hydrangea (multiple species and varieties)
American Witchhazel — Hamamelis virginiana
Viburnum — Viburnum dentatum ‘Blue Muffin’
Beautyberry — Callicarpa americana
Paperbark Maple — Acer griseum
Japanese Stewartia — Stewartia pseudocamellia
Schizachyrium
Texture gives me one reason to explain my love of fall. I love how the plants change and how their metamorphosis paints patterns in our gardens. The fine, the coarse, the medium all combined to create autumnal art.