Fill your autumn garden — and your house — with these subtle plants

COLORFUL FALL FOLIAGE gets all the attention, but if you look for it, the autumn garden is filled with subtle beauty and quiet attractions. Plump pods and flossy seed heads signal the end of this year’s growing season while holding the germ of the next. Outside in the garden or harvested for indoor seasonal décor, the following plants add nuance and refinement, along with a hint of wildness, to the end of the gardening year.

● Showy milkweed (Asclepius speciosa) is a statuesque hardy perennial with large, soft, gray velvety leaves and umbels of fragrant, starlike flowers. While here in the Pacific Northwest we’re outside the range of Monarch butterflies, other butterflies and pollinators flock to the nectar-rich blooms. After flowering, chubby horned fruits form and split to release a crop of flat oval seeds, each one attached to a silky plume to assist dispersal on a breeze. Grow the plant to support nature, then harvest the seed pods for wonder.

● Ornamental onions (Allium spp.) are practically perfect. I never tire of singing the praises of these long-lived hardy bulbs — and hopefully I’ve convinced you of their lasting charms in the garden and beyond. Especially the marvelous starry seed heads of A. christophii and A. schubertii that are durable enough to bedazzle the garden all summer. Before the rains begin, bring the seed heads indoors for a lasting bouquet, or give the star on your Christmas tree a botanical makeover.

● Opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) has several euphemistic names, including breadseed or culinary poppies. Fleeting, crumpled tissue-paper blooms in a variety of colors — deep purple is a favorite — are produced on annual plants with showy glaucous foliage throughout summer. But to my eyes, the real prizes are the fat pods that form after the petals fall. The pods begin that same luminous blue-green color, then ripen to straw when they are ready to disperse the copious seeds. A (perhaps-obvious) fact: While it is legal to grow Papaver somniferum for garden and seed production, it is illegal to manufacture opium from the poppies.

● Pasque flower (Pulsatilla vulgaris) and golden clematis (Clematis tangutica) are both in the Ranunculaceae, or buttercup, family. The former is a low-mounding perennial with furred purple blooms on short stems in spring, while the latter is a deciduous woody vine that produces nodding, deep yellow flowers in late summer. Yet their kinship is revealed when both plants produce similar feathery seed heads after blooming.

● Love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena), also in the buttercup family, is a hardy annual that reliably and politely self-sows in the garden; just be sure to thin spring seedlings to allow each plant to flourish. Your reward will be a continuous crop of multipetaled blooms, mostly blue, but some white and rose as well, depending on the seed mix. Each flower is held in a cuff of threadlike bracts — the “mist” — and appears in spring and early summer. But that’s just the beginning. After flowering, the plants set an equally abundant crop of ballooning seedpods topped with a filigreed crown. Harvest the seedpods for a dried arrangement, or think of them as the cutest package of seed you’ve ever seen, and share them with other gardeners.

● Honesty, sometimes called the money plant (Lunaria annua), is an annual brassica often found along weedy roadsides and in neglected alleyways. This wild child produces sweet pink or white blooms in spring followed by coin-shaped seed heads that split to reveal papery sheaths with a pearly sheen. While I love the notion of a wild child in pearls, it’s probably a good idea to keep this plant separate from your manicured beds and borders.