Plan a bed

Plants with green flowers

Plants with green and lime-green flowers: the spurges, hellebores and lady's mantle that calm a bed and light up shade.

Green flowers are a designer's flowers. They do not compete with anything, so they go with every colour, and they make the colours around them look cleaner: the lime-green froth of lady's mantle under roses, or the heads of spurges among tulips. In a white garden they are the best partners white has.

Many green "flowers" are not petals. A spurge's bright heads are bracts around tiny true flowers, and a hellebore's sepals turn green as its seed ripens, which is why it looks in flower for months. More than half the plants here take shade, where lime-green lights a dark corner as well as any white.

Every plant here has green flowers, or comes in green.

28 plants: 15 perennials, 2 bulbs, 3 grasses and 8 shrubs.

The dozen to start with

  • Lady's mantle

    Lady's mantle

    18 in · late May to early July

    Scalloped, velvety leaves that hold beads of rain like mercury, under a froth of tiny chartreuse flowers in early summer.

  • Panicle hydrangea 'Limelight'

    Panicle hydrangea 'Limelight'

    7 ft · mid July to early October · with white and pink

    Large, cone-shaped flower heads open soft lime green in midsummer, turn creamy white, and blush pink and burgundy in autumn.

  • Staghorn sumac 'Tiger Eyes'

    Staghorn sumac 'Tiger Eyes'

    6 ft · late June to mid July · host plant

    Deeply cut, ferny leaves that open chartreuse, turn bright yellow on fuzzy, rose-pink stems, and end the year in orange and scarlet.

  • Jack-in-the-pulpit

    Jack-in-the-pulpit

    18 in · early May to late May · with purple

    A hooded, green and maroon striped flower hides under two large three-part leaves in spring, followed by a club of red berries in late summer.

  • Whorled milkweed

    Whorled milkweed

    24 in · late June to late August · with white · host plant

    Needle-fine leaves in whorls up slender stems, topped with small clusters of greenish-white flowers through summer.

  • Soapweed yucca

    Soapweed yucca

    2½ ft · mid June to mid July · with white · host plant

    A spiky hemisphere of very narrow, stiff, blue-grey leaves edged in white threads, with a stout spike of greenish-white bells.

  • Spring snowflake

    Spring snowflake

    10 in · early March to late March · with white

    Chunky white bells, each petal tipped with a green or yellow spot, hang from short stems over glossy, strap-shaped leaves.

  • Mediterranean spurge

    Mediterranean spurge

    4 ft · late March to late May · with yellow

    A dome of upright stems clothed in blue-grey leaves like bottlebrushes, each ending in early spring in a huge cylinder of lime-yellow flowers.

  • Coralberry

    Coralberry

    4 ft · mid July to early August · with pink

    Arching stems lined in autumn and winter with tight clusters of small, coral-purple berries.

  • Bottlebrush grass

    Bottlebrush grass

    3 ft · late June to late August · host plant

    Open, bristly seed heads like bottle brushes stand above the leaves in summer.

  • Gray's sedge

    Gray's sedge

    2½ ft · late May to early September

    A native sedge grown for its seed heads: spiky, green stars like a medieval mace, which last from early summer into winter and turn brown.

  • Tulip 'Spring Green'

    Tulip 'Spring Green'

    18 in · early May to late May · with white

    Ivory-white petals, each with a broad, feathered flame of soft green up the centre.

All 28 plants

Front of a bed 7

Middle of a bed 12

Back of a bed 9

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