Purple Garden Ideas

Purple is wonderfully versatile: From light lavenders to rich, royal shades, purple flowers have a place in every garden. Check out these ideas from the Costa Farms Trial Garden on how to use purple flowers in your garden.

By Justin Hancock

Play with Purple Foliage

Plants with purple leaves are trendy. The rich color contrasts other plants that have green foliage, so they stand out from the crowd.

We started this small-space purple garden with a cluster of purple fountain grass. We accented it with two petunias: a lovely lavender-purple variety (Supertunia Lavender Skies) and a bicolor selection (Surprise Grape). The lighter variety catches your eye against the dark grass; the two-tone petunia does a perfect job of tying the grass and other petunia together.

What's Inside

Petunia Supertunia Lavender Skies
Petunia Surprise Grape
Purple fountain grass (Pennisetum Vertigo)

Contrast Purple Flowers with Silver Foliage

Purple foliage is perfect in the garden --- and so is silver. Plants with silver leaves are a neutral in the yard, meaning you can pair them with any other color for a lovely combo.

Here, we started with helichrysum --- it creates a low mound of drought-resistant, silvery leaves that's the perfect foil for shades of purple. The first flower we added is a hummingbird favorite: salvia. Offering rich flowers and fragrant foliage, it's also deer and rabbit resistant. With salvia, we've grown violet pentas -- another plant that deer and rabbits avoid, yet butterflies and hummingbirds love. As a low annual groundcover, we put a bicolor verbena in the mix. Its light lavender flowers pair well with the helichrysum; its darker flowers look good against the pentas.

And because we had a mailbox in the mix, we planted a vine -- cup and scaucer vine -- to scramble up and around. Its unique cup-shape flowers add a unique element to the planting.

What's Inside

Cup and saucer vine (Cobaea scandens)
Helichrysum Silverstar
Pentas Graffiti Violet
Salvia Salsa Purple
Verbena Wicked Purple

Plant Proven Performers

For this garden, we went with three tried-and-true favorites: verbena, petunia, and angelonia.

Verbena is a low, mounding/spreading plant that brings clusters of hydrangea-like flowers all spring and summer . There's a variety of colors on the market; we selected a bicolor shade here that offers purple flowers in the center of the cluster. As the blooms open, they fade to white.

Petunias are one of the most common annual flowers around. The variety that we chose offers a wealth of rich purple blooms that fade to a silvery-lavender color in the center. The color pattern is the opposite of the verbena and that creates a fun contrast.

Angelonia offers an upright habit and large flowers in a soft shade of purple; we think it's the perfect match for its two plant partners.

What's Inside

Angelonia Archangel Purple
Petunia Flashmob Blueerific
Verbena Wicked Blue

Start Early in Spring

There are so many wonderful spring flowers that bloom in shades of purple. So start the season with a bang if you live in the North with frost-tolerant flowers. We chose pansy, viola, and African daisy -- all with different shades of purple in their blooms -- for a bold spring show.

What's Inside

Osteospermum Akila Lavender
Pansy (Viola Wonderfall Purple and Blue Shades)
Viola Penny Purple Marina

Purple in a Pot

Don't have room for a garden? You can still enjoy purple flowers with container gardens. here, we mixed three gorgeous plants in two pots.

A petunia brings the most color to the plantings. This variety, Flash Mob Bluerific shows off purple flowers that have silvery centers. Those silvery centers are the perfect match for dusty miller --- a practically heat-, drought-, deer-, and rabbit-proof annual with lovely textured foliage.

To add vertical drama, we found a tall variety of snake plant. A common, and practically indestructible houseplant, snake plant is just as easy to care for outdoors. The silvery variegation is an ideal complement for the petunia and dusty miller.

What's Inside

Dusty miller (Senecio New Look)
Dusty miller (Senecio Silverdust)
Petunia Flash Mob Bluerific
Snake plant (Sansevieria Zeylanica)

Big Impact, Small Space

You can enjoy lots of impact and visual interest -- even if all the space you have is a container garden. This purple combo our Costa Farms experts put together highlights purple salvia, one of the easiest annuals to grow. It's paired with purple sweet potato vine, another longtime garden favorite. The sweet potato vine foliage is a lovely match to the salvia's flowers.

We also included a variegated dracaena -- typically a houseplant -- to add to the mix. Its gold-banded foliage is a fun way to brighten the rich purple tones.