Gray Plants, Colored Walls

Gray plants are all the rage where I live. But they are rarely used well, unlike those one can observe in good designs or in our wild spaces.

A November trip to El Paso, Alamito Gardens is a public housing project that I designed in 2008 for Moore Nordell Kroeger Architects:

Chinquapin Oak turned, the clean evergreen foliage of Pale Yucca / Yucca rupicola pulling off the cool season look.

This would not work with feathery, deciduous grays. Imagine gray twigs all winter? Reality over flowery prose - like "tapestries of colors", then stating how "our area is brown", commonly used to justify design and plant choices missing the mark of a space's needs.

Blue Sotol AKA Gray Sotol / Dasylirion wheeleri:

Some elements at work:

1) low budget, installation to maintenance
2) colored walls (notably red), native stone
3) evergreen in prominent locations
4) mature plant sizes considered for their spaces
5) microclimate - prairie yuccas E walls, desert sotols W walls
6) natives where they work, adapteds where natives don't work
7) bold foliage against random stone patterns
8) spiny leaf margins against a contrasting color
9) flowering lantanas died stolen, never replaced; succulents live on
10) massings of the same plant species, to unify