The trick is to vary the shapes and textures in your landscape design. Most of us know well the different colors in our landscape. But we seldom consider form and texture. We often overemphasize brilliantly colored annuals and flowering perennials.
Color is important.
But form and texture can add interesting contrasts and diversity to our design as well. In the simplest terms, texture is the relative softness or roughness of a plant. Fine-textured plants have a soft look such as boxwood, crenata hollies and junipers. Medium plants include cleyera, carissa holly and camellias. And coarse plants include magnolia, Burford holly and yucca.