Last month I started my seasonal orange bender. It being the color of all kinds of wonderful things, from mangoes to sunsets to campfire embers. I can’t get enough of it–in the garden or elsewhere. So I shared some of my favorite flowers and promised a return to the topic with a post on good leaves for orange themes. Here goes: Continue Reading →
Even though February was a short month, we managed to squeeze in a whole lot of posts on color! I think I’ve included everyone who left links here, and I found a few more of you in my travels around the garden-blogging community, but I’m sure I’ve missed some other great offerings. If you have any color-related posts that you’d like to have listed here, please leave a link below, and I’ll add it to the main list. Now, on to the summary, starting with… Continue Reading →
It was the great Christopher Lloyd, who upon my first visit to Great Dixter, facilitated me in opening my eyes to the fact that startling, contrasting color could make for an exuberant, edgy garden. When I took my first stroll down his long border and saw crisp red and orange cannas a few feet away from some sweet, deep pink flower, close to the color of Geranium psilostemon, I felt my skin crawling. It took a few more years for me to begin to appreciate Lloyd’s authentic ‘joie de vivre’ and keen sense of color in creating his garden palettes. So, for those of us (of which I think there are several) who still feel a bit tentative and restrained in experimenting with a wide swathe of colors in the garden, I say bite the bullet and let it rip. As my gardening pal, Chris Woods, has always contended in a somewhat saracastic tone: ” This is not brain surgery. It’s only plants. If you don’t like how they look, take them out and start over again”.
In this first picture at Doe Run in Unionville, Pa., orange potentilla becomes even more electric when placed in front of a grouping of pale and deeper pink astibles. Orange and pink together? You bet. It’s a winner!
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Of all the colors, orange is the most maligned. Maybe because it’s a cross between lurid red and zippy yellow, fiery orange exhibits a kind of hyper hybrid vigor—it’s more than the sum of its parts, way more. Perhaps because it is aggressively in your face, orange is a color that almost forces people to take sides. No one is indifferent to orange. You either love it or hate it. Continue Reading →
In taking some photos this week in my garden, I was struck by how the use of one color in a very ‘boundaried’ manner can make for a memorable composition. As gardeners, color plays such a prominent role in our creations, that it is easy to forget that ‘less’ can sometimes prove to be more effective.
Gazing at the branches of Hamamelis x intermida ‘Diane’ in bloom against the stark landscape brought to mind one of the most exquisite of all visual scenes that I remember from a movie: Schindler’s List. The scene, done in black and white, is of a war torn city strewn with carnage. Within this devestation, we see a little girl in a bright red coat walking. This vision has stuck with me for years as being incredibly powerful. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt for us to strive for such ‘solo’ color compositions in the garden (easier done in the winter garden) on occasion.
