Fall Landscape Design for Festive Color

Anticipate Autumn with Fall Garden Design

Essential Elements of Fall Landscape Design

Fall landscape design surpasses a few pumpkins on a porch. It’s about creating a cohesive plan to celebrate the festive season by welcoming visitors with warm autumn color installations and preparing your gardens for cooler months.

• Colors and Textures: While staying true to your aesthetic preferences, we assemble a rich palette using a variety of fall plants or seasonal decorations like pumpkins or ornamental peppers. Combining native grasses and cold-hardy plants for greenery and texture adds natural beauty and provides the perfect backdrop to highlight seasonal plantings in shades of amber, saffron, crimson, and aubergine.

• Layers of Depth: To display a natural flow and help a landscape feel dimensional rather than flat, we layer plants based on their size. Taller plants, such as trees or large shrubs, form a backdrop, with progressively shorter plants placed in front of them. Occasionally, some taller plants can be intentionally placed in the foreground to create additional depth.

• Container Color: Embrace guests with an inviting entry, or surround pools and eating areas with festive container color. From classic to modern, container planters offer an ideal vessel for showcasing fall annuals.

• Cozy Spaces: Our landscape designers can add warmth with a fire pit, fireplace, or outdoor heater, illuminate areas with landscape lighting, and curate and install updated furnishings and colorful accent decor to fashion a festive outdoor gathering area for the fall season.

Plants and Trees for Fall Landscape Design

If you’re considering adding trees, shrubs, annuals, or perennials to your landscape, now is the perfect time to plant. Cooler temperatures and autumn rain help new plants establish strong root systems before winter’s frost.

Trees and Shrubs for Fall Foliage

• Maples: A classic favorite, maples are notorious for their magnificent red, orange, and yellow leaves. Large varieties include Autumn Blaze, Red Sunset, and October Glory. Smaller architectural Japanese maples are also quite popular in North Texas for their delicate leaf structure and an array of fabulous fall foliage.
•  Cedar Elm: These drought-tolerant trees display a brilliant show of yellow gold in the fall.

• Ginkgos: Known for their distinctive, fan-shaped leaves, ginkgos brighten from green to breathtaking yellow-gold in fall.
• Chinese Pistache: While they begin as the “ugly duckling” of the tree world, with proper pruning, their gawky, misshapen form blossoms into a beautiful tree displaying spectacular fall color in luminous shades of orange, red, and gold.
• Oakleaf Hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia): These spectacular summer stunners posess large, oak-shaped leaves that transform for fall into fierce, fiery red or burgundy foliage.

Fall Annuals and Perennials

• Ornamental Kale and Cabbage: Renowned for their ruffled, colorful foliage in shades of white, green, pink, and purple, these colorful plants are cold-hardy and can withstand light frosts.
• Chrysanthemums (Mums): The quintessential fall homecoming flower symbolizes friendship and well-being. Available in a wide array of colors, mums thrive in container gardens and make excellent fillers in garden beds.

• Coleus: Famous for its colorful foliage, coleus is a lovely, low-maintenance plant that adds a flourish of fall color to containers and garden beds.  Its garish, multicolored leaves vary from green, yellow, pink, red, purple, and maroon, making it popular in vivid Victorian gardens. Hailing from the mint family, this showstopper occasionally blooms at the ends of its long stalks.

• Celosia:  These striking, cone-shaped blooms convey quite the curb appeal and contrast gallantly against bright greenery. Add these rich-hued beauties to your garden for a stunning fall spectacle.
• Sedum: Known for their distinctive star-shaped flower clusters in sprays or clusters, these drought-tolerant species offer low ground cover or upright varieties.
• Crotons: Infuse your containers with colorful crotons to add a bountiful dimension to your exterior decor. Important note: These plants perform well in pots, but their leaves, and especially the seeds, can be harmful to curious pets or children, so be wary of where you plant them.
• Pansies and Violas: These cold-hardy annuals create a carpet of color in garden beds or add a pop of panache to containers. They can be planted in the fall for blooms that last through a light winter frost.

Ornamental Grasses

Ornamental grasses add texture, movement, and sound to a fall landscape as the autumn breeze blows. These varieties display striking transformations to both their plumes and foliage as temperatures cool.

• Pink Muhly Grass: Its wispy pink plumes produce fantastic “fall color” from its bloom rather than its foliage. When planted in masses and backlit by the sun, it creates a dramatic scenic view.
• Maiden Grass (Miscanthus sinensis) Maiden Grass offers both beautiful foliage and posh plumes as autumn grows closer. In late summer, its plumes emerge as pink to reddish and transform into showstopping silvery-white feathers with tan or golden foliage as they mature into the fall.
• Purple Fountain Grass: Although this “thriller” is colorful throughout its growing season, it sports its peak burgundy to purple foliage and deep red plumes in the late summer and fall. It’s excellent for borders as well as an accent in containers.

Seasonal Decorations and Accents

• Pumpkins and Gourds: Of course, no fall landscape design is complete without pumpkins and gourds. Available in a surplus of shapes, sizes, and colors from pale white to intense orange, intertwining pumpkins and gourds can create stunning displays in garden beds, on porches, or as part of container arrangements.
• Ornamental Peppers – Add a little whimsy and fall pizazz with a peppering of tiny colorful ornamental peppers in garden beds or containers.