appreciating black

The Inter­net is a hum­bling con­trap­tion. Any time you think you’ve got a new and excit­ing idea you can trawl the web for a few min­utes and find that someone’s had the same idea long before you.

Case in point: With Hal­loween approach­ing, I was think­ing about the color black and how that’s prob­a­bly the last color you’ll hear a gar­dener talk­ing about using in the gar­den. And then I run across this book online, Black Magic & Pur­ple Pas­sion: Dark Foliage and Flow­ers for the Gar­den, by Karen Platt. Dang. She got there first, and in the year 2000. I haven’t had a chance to look at the book yet, but it sounds like it could be a good resource for plants that fea­ture the dark­est, rich­est depths of color.

I shouldn’t have been sur­prised. For well over a decade now, vio­las and pan­sies have been avail­able in dark black-purple col­ors. And from long before that, there’s been a near-black maroon hol­ly­hock that goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s days at Mon­ti­cello. And that’s just the tip of the black iceberg.

Look­ing around my gar­den I can come up with a cou­ple more inter­est­ing exam­ples of plants and flow­ers that come in black or some­thing pretty darn close to it, dontcha know (as Sarah Palin might say…).

Salvia discolor

Salvia dis­color

Andean sage, Salvia dis­color, has these lit­tle dark, dark flow­ers that read as black more than the pro­found pur­ple that they are. In my gar­den the plant gets about three feet tall and like most sages sprawls a bit. It’s best used where you can appre­ci­ate the dark flow­ers up close. The rest of the plant is close to white in color–pale green on the tops of the leaves, white below–so this is a plant with lots of inter­est­ing contrast.

Black bamboo

Black bam­boo

Black bamboo plant

Black bam­boo plant

And then there’s black bam­boo, Phyl­lostachys nigra, the stems of which ripen in their sec­ond year to this beau­ti­ful black color.

Although listed as grow­ing twenty to thirty feet, the plant in my gar­den has stayed closer to ten or twelve feet tall. Give it water if you want it big, or only an occa­sional offer­ing, like I do, to keep it smaller.

Being a clump­ing bam­boo it’s pretty well behaved when it comes to spread­ing. Here it’s con­tained on two sides by walls, and to keep it in bounds John dug a shal­low trench join­ing the two walls, dumped in some left­over dry cement mix, and watered it in. The plant crosses the con­crete line only occa­sion­ally, and when it does it’s easy to snip the way­ward rhizomes.

The hard­est job with this plant is thin­ning out the stems that have died back. Every other year I devote half an hour or so and dis­ap­pear inside the plant with a pair of hand pruners–not a job for the claus­tro­pho­bic. The job is best done after spring nest­ing sea­son, after some of the local birds use the dense foliage to raise their young.

Want more ideas for black plants? Take a look at King Seeds, a seed resource in New Zealand where they have flow­ers arranged by color, includ­ing black! (There they list pop­pies, dianthus, nas­tur­tiums and nemophila ‘Penny Black’ among their dark-flowered offerings.)

Hal­loween isn’t far away, of course. But these are great plants that deserve a place in gar­dens year round.

October 07 2008 04:35 am | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: • • • • • •

3 Responses to “appreciating black”

  1. Sylvia (England) on 07 Oct 2008 at 6:13 am #

    I love that Salvia, it is going on my wish list! I had heard of it before but not realised that the leaves where so light. Thank you for the picture

    Best wishes Sylvia (England)

  2. Greg on 13 Oct 2008 at 9:12 am #

    I’m just tick­led that Sylvia likes salvia…but I think it’s pretty great, too. Looks like a fun plant. The bam­boo looks pretty cool, too.

  3. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » ooh, scary! on 22 Oct 2008 at 4:08 am #

    […] keep­ing with my dark pur­ple and black themes of some recent posts (like this one), here are a cou­ple pic­tures Jenny shared with me of some of her plants. This first one is a […]

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