26 Delightful, Deadly, Fanciful Plants for Your Goth Garden

Goth gardening is a new way of growing founded on richly-colored deep purple, blood red and almost black plants as well as poisonous, parasitic and deadly plants of all sorts. The foundation of every goth garden is a selection of these dramatic plants combined with silver, chartreuse and white plants to provide contrast. Or as Tabar Gifford of American Meadows—who's a fan of this style of gardening notes, "there's something about a near-black iris or a plum-leafed heuchera that makes everything around it feel more alive by contrast. The goth garden trend feels like permission to stop apologizing for wanting your outdoor space to have atmosphere, mystery and personality, not just prettiness, and that's a shift I completely support."

Read on to get our picks of some of the most gorgeously moody plants, many with fascinating stories, that you can use as the foundation of your goth garden.

We've broken these goth garden plants into color families of nearly black, purple and red and then offered suggestions of great contrasting plants to set off their morose color scheme. To round things up, we've included some of our favorite bad news botanicals: poisonous, carnivorous and strange plants that would make wonderfully weird additions to your goth garden.

'Black Lace' elderberry Sambucus nigra ‘Eva’ (shown here) unfurls black, lacy leaves that resemble a Japanese maple. Plants grow 6 to 8 feet tall and wide. In European folklore 'Black Lace' elderberry, like all elderberries, is believed to be guarded by an Elder mother, a protective spirit who punishes those who cut or burn elderberry bushes without her permission.

Truly black flowers and plants are hard to come by, and have inspired decades of scientific pursuit. The quest for a perfectly black tulip, for instance, obsessed growers following the publication of novelist Alexandre Dumas' novel The Black Tulip in 1850. But the way plants absorb light via photosynthesis always leaves a trace of red or purple rather than a true deep black in plants, so that pursuit has often felt fruitless. However many plant varieties come very, very close, such as the shockingly beautiful 'Queen of Night' tulip which makes a delightful accent, popping out of a goth garden bed.

On cloudy days, this heirloom plant, once grown by Thomas Jefferson, looks almost black. It's actually dark purple, although you can see flashes of red in bright sunlight. This biennial matures at 5 to 6 feet tall. It was once planted around Victorian outhouses so that visitors would know where to go when in need of some blessed relief.

The perennial purple leaf phormium 'Black Adder' adds drama with its clumping evergreen leaves and spiky form. It works especially well as a border plant and in container gardens. Also known as New Zealand flax, phormium varieties often feature black sticky seed pods that New Zealand's indigenous Maori children refer to as witches' fingers.

With its lovely almost-black color, delicate little Viola cornuta has a true hint of menace. You can find a variety of other nearly black violas for your goth garden including 'Back to Black', the heirloom variety 'Molly Sanderson', 'Bowles Black' and 'Blackout'.

Lush, petulant 'Raven Girl' bearded iris becomes exceptionally lovely when dipped in black. There are a number of these dramatic black bearded irises, including 'Black Suited', 'Black Water', 'Black is Black' ,'Black Sultan' and 'Superstition'.

This herbaceous perennial also known as spurge is toxic, so keep it away from children and pets. Looking for other dark leaf examples of this gorgeous succulent? Try 'Miner's Merlot' or 'Blackbird'. Or for something truly extraordinary, 'White Ghost' euphorbia is a haunting silvery spurge that "bleeds" a poisonous milky sap. Yikes!

Another way to lean into dark plants and flowers for a goth look is to look for rich, jewel-toned purple botanicals which look especially gorgeous set against chartreuse plants. Colocasia 'Black Ripple' is a compact, dwarf elephant ear with deeply puckered, shiny chocolate-purple leaves and near-black stems that looks enchanting at the front of a garden bed.

Sedum 'Night Embers' is a striking, low-maintenance perennial featuring black-purple leaves, intense red stems and mauve-pink flowers that add incredible contrast to its almost black leaves. Plant this sedum in masses for a haunting effect.

With its rich red to purple color, flat, paddle-like leaves and frothy pink-purple smoke-like flower plumes, smoke bush is a sensational addition to a garden founded on moody plants. Cotinus coggygria 'Lilla' is a deciduous dwarf variety of smoke bush bred to grow in a much more compact form than traditional smoke bush. Lilla is derived from the 'Royal Purple' cultivar, a more typical in size smoke bush that can grow up to 15 feet tall.

Also known as beardtongue, penstemon is the largest genus of flowering plants native to North America. "This is one of my personal favorites because it earns its place in the garden all season long, not just when it's flowering" says Tabar Gifford, a master gardener with American Meadows. "Rich chocolate-bronze foliage energes in spring and holds its color through fall, creating dramatic constrast long before the pale blush-pink flower spokes appear." Tabar calls 'Dark Towers' one of the easiest dark-leaf perennials to grow in your goth garden.

Loropetalum, which includes more than 70 varieties, is an easy-to-grow garden favorite whose mauve-purple leaves give the plant real presence in the garden amidst shades of green. 'Purple Pixie' is a dwarf, weeping loropetalum with deep purple foliage. With its "depressed" and downcast foliage 'Purple Pixie' is also a wonderful addition to a goth garden.

A plant that combines the best of both color worlds, 'Black Forest Cake' heuchera has almost black foliage and bright cherry red flowers. There are a host of heuchera with goth-worthy tones to consider including 'Black Beauty' 'Black Pearl' and 'Obsidian'.

Shades of dark red are a bewitching part of any goth garden, evoking wine and blood and the bewitching scarlet lips and hair of a Gothic literary heroine. Astilbe 'Fanal' is a compact perennial with blood red foliage that offers a real visual jolt within a gardenscape.

Capable of growing 3 to 5 feet tall, Cordyline 'Electric Pink' is an evergreen shrub featuring arching, sword-shaped leaves with dark maroon centers and neon-pink margins whose upright stance in the garden makes it a lovely surprise. Like some exotic sea creature this punk rock plant hovers somewhere between a grass and a palm, offering a wealth of visual interest when planted near darker plants.

Elephant Ear 'Redemption' (Colocasia esculenta 'Redemption') is a dramatic-looking tropical with shiny, rippled, jet-black leaves defined by hot pink centers and veins. The colors become more intense when the temperatures rise. Place this one by a pond or use it in a container or as an accent plant; it thrives in part sun and reaches 3 to 4 feet tall and wide. It's deciduous and hardy in only Zones 7 to 11, but you can bring it indoors to enjoy as a houseplant. There are plenty of colocasias ripe for goth garden planting: 'Black Coral', 'Black Magic', 'Diamond Head' 'Illustris', 'Aloha' and more.

A genuninely eerie plant for its hypnotic contrast of bright pink and deep purple color, 'Adobe Pink' features an arresting color and form that make it a natural in gardens that lean into the strange. This vibrant red and burgundy annual has jagged foliage and a dramatic look that would look even more impactful tucked in beside some deep purple goth plants.

Goth garden plants in rich, murky tones become even more arresting when placed next to white, silver and light green plants which play up their color. One ideal plant for contrasting color is Dichondra 'Silver Falls' (Dichondra argentea), a fast-growing trailing perennial with silvery, shimmering silver leaves on cascading stems. Perfect for adding a spooky, macabre element to the garden, you can also achieve that haunted house, cobweb effect with Spanish moss, or try 'Blackie' sweet potato vine for a deep purple trailing plant to spill across your landscape and containers.

Also known as Japanese painted fern 'Red Beauty' has silvery gray-green fronds and burgundy red stems and veins that give it a transfixing effect in the garden. Ferns were an obsession with Victorian gardeners who hunted, collected and categorized the many varieties. Plant fiends of the time were so overtaken with Pteridomania or "fern fever," they ornamented countless objects with ferns from pottery to clothing to gravestones and numerous books were published to aid in fern identification on fern-hunting expeditions into England's forests.

This hardy begonia does best in shade where its unusual coloration practically glows. 'Sterling Moon' has puckered forest-green leaves that are frosted with silver giving the plant a cobweb appearance that makes it ideal next to deep black plants like heuchera.

While some goth garden plants delight for their midnight color scheme, there are also many goth-suitable plants that harbor dark secrets and whose colors contrast beautifully with darker plants. Datura is one such plant. One of this flower’s common names, jimsonweed, comes from “Jamestown weed” — a reference to Revolutionary War soldiers who foraged this plant for food and suffered wild hallucinations. Every variety of datura has potent narcotic qualities, so keep it away from children and pets. A dangerous and beautiful plant, datura demands special care but the rewards of growing this plant are legion. For one thing, datura's night-opening blooms attract sphinx moths and other pollinators and its uncanny white glow provides lovely contrast with jewel-tone plants.

Because ghost pipe (Monotropa uniflora) lacks chlorophyll, it doesn’t need sunshine to grow, but thrives in the deepest, darkest forests. A parasitic plant that feasts off of its host like a vampire, ghost pipe finds nutrition by connecting with underground fungi that in turn feed off of tree roots. Also known as Indian pipe, this plant was so beloved by poet Emily Dickinson she wrote a poem in its honor. Ghost pipe produces one 3- to 9-inch-tall stem topped with a white- or pinkish-white bell-shaped flower. This spooky wildflower turns black if picked, so it’s best enjoyed in its native habitat. If you own a woodlot with oaks or maples, search out this spectral flower and consider yourself charmed if you catch a glimpse of her.

A plant with a disreputable past, wormwood is the ingredient in the notorious 19th century spirit European absinthe—also known as the '"green fairy." Absinthe was rumored to drive people who drank it mad. Author Edgar Allan Poe was said to have concocted some of his more diabolical tales under the influence of that wormwood-derived drink. In the garden this silvery-green plant (and member of the daisy family) provides gorgeous contrast to deeper purple and black plants.

An undeniably strange and showy annual plant, castor bean has large purple-red palmate leaves and bright red spiky seed pods that give the plant an extraterrestrial dimension. An incredibly vigorous and fast growing plant, castor bean can grow as high as 10 feet tall in just one growing season. It is also an incubator for one of the world's most deadly poisons, ricin. That highly toxic poison was once considered for potential chemical weapons in World Wars I and II and has been used in political assassinations. So keep this twisted beauty away from pets and children.

Eryngium planum 'Blue Glitter' has an otherworldly look not unlike castor bean with its strange metallic spikes radiating out from its pincushion flower head. American Meadows Tabar Gifford recommends planting it with dark leaf companions for a truly "electric" combination. Sea holly's name comes from the Greek word eruggarein "to ward off." The plant has a spooky association in folklore of the past with defense and magical properties. Eryngium planum was often planted near doorways to keep out evil spirits.