[Author’s note: I’m making this first part up.]

Imagine this late night scene: You’ve finished flossing, folded down the quilt, fluffed the pillows, flipped open F is for Fugitive, felt it fall flat on your face, and flipped off the fluorescent.

That’s their signal. I’m not condoning their behavior, mind you, but as you sail off to The Land of Nod, your garden gnomes begin their nightly escapades. Imagine a job like theirs — standing immobile while the summer sun bakes off your paint, or winter winds whip you with sleet. And what’s with the sprinkler bidet?

So when late night falls and their shift ends, the gnomes need to blow off some steam. Off to the all-night pub, they belly up to the brass foot rail and get down to serious business.

The night isn’t over yet. Stumbling home, their little concrete eyes gleaming, the merry pranksters repeat their pre-dawn ritual: Picking off all the flower buds waiting to open, so the garden never blooms.

The moral of this story: Design your garden as though these mischievous, misanthropic (or is that mis-flor-opic?), buggers live in your garden. Don’t use flowers as the sole visual interest in your garden. Instead, concentrate on creating year-round interest by exploiting your plants’ shapes, density, leaf patterns, and foliage colors, so your garden looks great, flowers or not.

Allow me to share one of the most elegantly sophisticated little corners of landscaping I’ve ever seen. What knocks me out so much is the use of two key visual design principles – harmony (elements with similarities) and contrast (elements with differences). This vignette sits a few blocks from my house, adorning the Sansum Diabetes Research Center in Santa Barbara.

(Back row, left to right) You’re looking at Rhamnus californica (California coffeeberry), Pittosporum tenuifolium ‘Marjorie Channon’ (Marjorie Channon Kohuhu – that always cracks me up), and Geijera parvifolia (Australian willow). In front is another Aussie, Lomandra confertifolia ‘Little Con’ (small mat rush).

From this zoomed out view, note the harmonious interplay of the four plants, all sharing soft, cloudlike forms. Additionally, the willow and Kohuhu have similar shapes – taller than they are wide.

Next, we’ll swing through the composition, moving from left to right.

Too much harmony can get boring, so a little variety needs to be injected: the dark, dull-green, larger leaves of the coffeeberry; the soft, milky tint of Kohuhu smaller leaves; and the strikingly bright, fine texture and linear form of the mat rush. There’s no mistaking where one plant ends and another begins.

In the picture above, notice the similar forms of Kohuhu and willow, and the fact that each is dense and fine textured. The differences in foliage color are less striking than the side-by-side paring with the coffeeberry. And since the willow foliage has a bit of yellow underlying the green, it blends with the warmth of the mat rush foliage.

I guess that’s it. Maybe you’ve picked up a few tips for creating interesting plant groupings in your own garden. And don’t think you can’t use flowering plants in the garden – they’re the icing on the cake.

Now I’ve gotta go fluff the book, flip off the fugitive, and floss the gnomes.