blue and orange (gbbd)

The color com­bi­na­tion of blue and orange reminds me of noisy kid­die toys, of hard molded plas­tic wait­ing room chairs, of harshly lit 1970s fast-food restau­rants try­ing unsuc­cess­fully to look mod­ern and friendly, or of jer­seys for some high school foot­ball team. With two col­ors scream­ing at each other from oppo­site sides of a color wheel, it’s not a com­bi­na­tion that brings me a lot of joy or peace.

But spring is here, and part of the far back yard has been bloom­ing away. Its main col­ors are–you guessed it–blue and orange, mainly hot orange Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies and sky blue flow­ers of nemophilia, baby blue eyes.

As much as I gen­er­ally don’t love these col­ors together, it’s hard for me not to like this lit­tle zone of perky chaos.

Even the blue flow­ers against the brick hard­scape rein­forces the blue and orange (or blue and orange-red) colors.

But in a gar­den you hardly every have two strong flower col­ors alone. The vari­eties of leaf green serve as peace­mak­ers, sep­a­rat­ing the war­ring col­ors and inject­ing their own shades into the gar­den color palette. Other sec­ondary leaf or flower col­ors help the enrich the palette and keep the peace.

From some angles a softer blue-gray pro­vides a back­ground to the hot orange flow­ers. Here the foliage is the now-common chalk fin­gers, Senecio man­dralis­cae. It’s still a blue and orange theme, but the blue is less emphatic and the orange is per­mit­ted to dominate.

Lit­tle pock­ets of cool-colored plants pro­vide areas of visual rest. Here’s baby blue eyes and chalk fin­gers with a dark purple-black aeo­nium. Pre­tend I cut back the dying nar­cis­sus foliage…

Some view­points let the cool col­ors pre­dom­i­nate, with just a few punc­tu­a­tion marks of poppy orange. New into this photo are whitish-violet flow­ered black sage (Salvia mel­lif­era), magenta free­way daisy (Osteosper­mum), with a softer orange-red desert mal­low (Sphaer­al­cea ambigua) in the upper left corner.

I’ll have to rethink what the com­bi­na­tion of blue and orange means to me, at least in the gar­den. These flow­ers may be gone in a cou­ple of months. Maybe this a com­bi­na­tion that I should embrace and asso­ciate with “spring.”

Spring is bring­ing lots of other col­ors com­bi­na­tions and other flow­ers to gar­dens around the world. Check them out at May Dreams Gar­dens, where Carol is host­ing yet another Gar­den Bog­gers Bloom Day. Thank you, Carol!

April 14 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • • • • • • • • • | 19 Comments »