The house projects continue. We’ve worked around my little studio building and are now on the final stretch, 22 feet of wall that backs a raised planter. There’s only one window to worry about on this wall, but all the plants are making it a delicate demolition operation.
Some of the greenery is looking a little trodden on. This is a row of island coral bells, Heuchera maxima, that hasn’t escaped the occasional stomping on by a random foot. But for the most part these should look okay in a couple months after the rains perk them up.
I pruned this plant out of the way. It’s my only rose, the green rose that I’ve been growing since my early teens. September and October aren’t prime rose pruning seasons, but I’m hoping the plant doesn’t mind too much.
This plant, a Bonbero hot pepper, so far has escaped being stepped on or having pieces of old siding dropped on it. It’s nearing the end of its short period of productivity, so I won’t stay up nights worrying about it. Still, now that the hot peppers are coloring up red against the leaves, I’d miss having it in the garden.
We’re still undecided about what color to paint the siding once we get it up. I was thinking dark and dramatic, and only somewhat kidding suggested to John that we “paint it black.” When we got down to the final layer of old tarpaper it was a chance to preview what a dark color would look like behind the plants.
Here’s the black of the tarpaper with the new white Tyvek house wrap for contrast. The white looks awfully harsh against the plants in the foreground. White is a good to accentuate some sinewy branches or the architectural contours of a dramatic plant. But the contrast between the white and the plants is really extreme, and we probably won’t be going with light colors. The dark colors recede nicely behind the plants, a feature that might be nice in this narrow garden space. The leaf colors contrast against it gently, but I worry that the plants might get a little lost.
One of the really popular tinted stucco colors being used in the neighborhood right now is a dull dark green color, which to me seems like the worst color possible for setting off green plants. Silver-leaved meditteranean and native plants can stand a chance of contrasting against it, but it’s pretty deadly for leaf-green plants. So we definitely won’t be doing dark green.
But a dark urban gray? I even thought of a dark red, but the house came with what seems like ten acres of brickwork, so I think that’d be too much as well.
We still have a week or two before we commit to a color. What would be hip, soothing and flattering for plants all at the same time? I’m one of those people who could spend hours looking at paint swatches, but that’s easier to do than the hard construction work that I need to get out of the way before getting to paint colors.
That said, I’m still a big believer in the power of color, and it could be more important decision in the long run than where we decide to move a wall outlet. Decisions, decisions…
October 06 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: color combinations • colors • wall colors | 7 Comments »
I often have trouble mixing ornamentals and vegetables together in a garden bed that’s supposed to be “for company,” a bed that’s meant to be attractive as well as containing tasty-looking plants that you’d like to take to the dinner table.
Some parts of the garden where I’ve snuck veggies in with the other plants look a little chaotic, but here’s a patch that I really like the looks of. Earlier I showed part of this corner that the bedroom window overlooks. But new things are starting to bloom, and the colors are starting to really click for me.
When I was putting this bed together, I set myself the main rule of “nothing yellow.” In deciding what veggies to place there, I just stuck to that organizing principle. (Okay, can you tell that I work in libraries and organize information during the week?)
This bed features several edibles: red-stemmed chard, orange-stemmed chard, Red Winter red Russian kale, red beets, plus catmint for tea (and for the cat). The ornamentals include scarlet geum, purple heliotrope, violet blue-eyed grass, the salmon-colored bulb Homeria collina, two blue sages (Salvia sagittata and Salvia cacaliaefolia) plus a few other things not in bloom.
For sure, there’s a lot of red and blue and purple going on here. But several variations on green in the background green do wonders to pull together what might otherwise be chaos.
I’m going to hate cutting any of these veggies for dinner…
April 04 2009 | Categories: my garden | Tags: blue • color • color combinations • flower beds • purple • red • vegetable gardening • vegetables • violet | 9 Comments »
I still haven’t gotten around to doing something about the color of the my little detached studio behind the house. Colors of residential neighborhoods and garden walls usually tend towards pretty neutral shades. Here are a couple combinations of walls with plants that I thought were pretty dramatic while still being flattering to the landscaping. They could be interesting choices for garden walls or even—if you’re truly brave—walls of your house.
This first one is the freeway side of the Tustin Marketplace in Orange County, as see from Interstate 5 on my way up to LA last week. The fairly dark burnt red-to-salmon wall coloration mixes dramatically with the green bougainvillea foliage and reddish magenta flowers in the foreground. And the silver trunks and bright green foliage of the trees in the background stand out dramatically against the wall.
The second is another retail situation, the plantings by the parking lot at the Mission Valley Mall here in town. The violet wall, as the preceding reddish one, once again plays against the silver trunks of the trees and the bright green leaves.
The first combination to me feels warming and energetic without being too hyper, with the red being a color that isn’t so far removed from the Mediterranean themed housing that continues to be popular in Southern California. The second is definitely cooler, more restrained—and maybe a little more urban and adventurous.
We’ll see how brave I am when I finally have time to address residing the studio and rebuilding the attached patio cover. But I’m definitely feeling like doing something other than white or beige this time…
March 23 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: color • color combinations • hardscape • walls | 4 Comments »
I guess I’m a little old-fashioned because, yes, I occasionally still buy books. Even with all the information you can find on the web, there’s something satisfying in holding a book in the hand. It’s the difference between looking at a calendar of flowers and actually holding one in your hand, feeling the softness of the petals and taking in the fragrance.
Last week’s mail brought me a copy of a book I posted on recently, Karen Platt’s Black Magic & Purple Passion: Dark Foliage and Flowers for the Garden. This is a slender little volume that has its heart a long listing of plants that have black or dark purple attributes: flowers, foliage, or stems. Most of the plant descriptions come with brief information on cultivation and propagation.
There are dozens of photos of individual plants, but because of the economics of publishing they’re all clustered on the glossy pages in the center of the book. It would of course have been more useful to have the images next to the descriptions.
Earlier I posted a couple plants in my garden that I’d consider black or dark purple, and this book listed one of them, black bamboo.
Near-black aeonium
The book additionally mentions a couple others that are already in my garden.
Aeonium arboreum, shown here in semi-shade against the green leaves of an aloe, is a succulent that has found a home in many Southern California gardens. I’d definitely consider it to have leaves that are very close to black. It’s incredibly easy to grow as long as it doesn’t freeze.
Another of the plants listed in the book, Penestemon digitalis ‘Husker Red,” is one that I’d consider more to be more of a green plant that’s got gentle red-purple tints to the leaves. My plant lives in a semi-shaded location, however, and given more sun it might develop darker foliage. Also, what one person would consider dark purple, another might call a totally different color. Time to get out the Pantone color charts!
Salvia lyrata ‘Purple Volcano’
Once you start thinking about all the color you see in the plants around you, you could easily add to the author’s list of dark plants. Here’s the ‘Purple Volcano’ clone of a US East-Coast sage,
Salvia lyrata. The flowers are insignificant, but the foliage is this gorgeous dark purple. I have it planted here with yellow-and-red gaillardia, though I think I’d have done better pairing it with pinks or blues. Well, it
is transplanting season, and it’s amazing what a person can do with a shovel in five minutes’ time…
Three planting diagrams in the book give some ideas about how these black flowers and plants could be used. One pairs the dark plants with gold colors, and a second uses silver-colored plants for a foil. The third shows an “island” planting, where a walkway surrounds a bed of dark plants. I’m sure that the planting schemes would give you striking results.
Unfortunately the book doesn’t have any real-world photos of these planting suggestions or of any of the dark plants in a real garden setting, and that’s probably the books weakest link. Personally, I can begin to imagine how a small handful of plants might look together, but I really have to see photos of the more complicated plantings for them to make any sense to me.
Somehow all this color-theming seems like a particularly British thing—just think of Gertrude Jekyll’s influential White Garden, planted in 1948 at Sissinghurst. (And of course, Jekyll is well known for her discussions of garden color.)
Even if you don’t want to cross over to the dark side, this books has many good ideas for plants that you could use to provide pockets of dark interest throughout your own garden. What better way to appreciate the brilliant flowers most of us have in our gardens than by having some subtle, dark plants to set them off?
October 14 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: black • color combinations • Karen Platt • purple | No Comments »
I wrote earlier about how the eucalyptus trees in my area had started to shed their bark and mentioned how there were some interesting colors combinations that were happening as part of the process. The trees have continued shedding bark all summer and now into fall.
Not long ago I was talking to Linda about colors, and she’d mentioned being struck by some of the same colors herself, and how someday she thought it might be interesting to make a quilt using some of those unexpected juxtapositions of color.
The widowmaker
For fun, I’ve taken some photos and made color palettes based on them using the tools at
colourlovers.com. Most of the combos come from colors on the bark, but the last one below derives from the colors of new leaves against the berry-red shades of the new stems.
These are all on the literal side. You could take any of these pictures and get a lot wilder—especially into the plum-grape-purple territory.
The titles for the palettes—“widomaker”—comes from the dark nickname gum trees have in Australia because of their casual habit of dropping branches onto unsuspecting folk below. It’s not hyperbole. Twice, just this past year, I’ve come within less than fifty feet of having big branches dropped on my head.
Exposed eucalyptus trunk
Color by COLOURlovers
Shedding eucalyptus bark
Color by COLOURlovers
New eucalyptus leaves
Color by COLOURlovers
September 21 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • plant profiles | Tags: color combinations • eucalyptus • exfoliating bark • inspired by nature | No Comments »
It drives John crazy, but I love it when plants begin to grow into each other. When I’m ready to sit back and enjoy the moment, you can hear the opening and closing of pruning shears in his hands.
Pointillist garden colors
Here’s a planting that reached this critical stage a couple months ago, a clustering of pink gaura (Gaura lindheimeri), blue ivy-leaved sage (Salvia cacaliaefolia) and the wacky mixed red and/or white blooms of Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips.’ The plants have flowers of approximately the same size, and from just a few feet away you stop to see the individual flowers and begin to see the planting as a gentle vibration of colors that move from pink to red to white to blue. (The reddish foliage of the gaura also adds to the effect.)
It makes me think a little bit of the similar color effects in the paintings of Georges Seurat. His best-known painting, La Grande Jette, inspired Stephen Sondheim to compose his musical, Sunday in the Park with George.
Georges Seurat. A Sunday on La Grande Jette-1884, 1884-1886. Oil on canvas, 207.5 x 308 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. [ source ]
Seurat Grande Jette detail
On the canvas, pointillist little dots of color give a vibratory shimmer to the surface of the painting. Instead of mixing the colors on his palette, he lets your eye do it.
Big chunks of garden color laid out next to each other can be a great effect. But I also like the shimmer of little dots of color. Seurat had an interesting thing going on with his later work—Why not appropriate it for the garden ?
September 16 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • my garden | Tags: color combinations • gaura • Gaura lindheimeri • Georges Seurat • ivy-leaved sage • pointillism • Poistimpresionism • sages • Salvia cacaliaefolia • Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips' | 1 Comment »
Last fall’s big planting effort was a big raised bed of perennials, shrubs, bulbs, a tree fern and a tangerine tree, most of which went into the ground over the course of two months. While I don’t strive for total order in everything in my life, I was worried that assembling a bed of so many different kinds of plants all at once might quickly lead to total chaos, something on the order of those “color bowls” that they sell at nurseries and home stores.
(Okay, yes, some color bowls are well done and actually quite nice, but the worst are tossed-together plant combinations that provide work for the color-blind and are the garden equivalent of making yourself a cafeteria plate of spaghetti, frozen yogurt, fried chicken, and creamed corn, all mixed together and doused with ketchup and caramel sauce.)
To help tame the potential disorder I set myself one basic organizing principle: Nothing yellow (and only small doses of orange).
I have nothing against the color yellow, and in fact I have yellow all over the garden. But I wanted to create a quiet zone with soothing colors that would harmonize with each other. Also, one of my least favorite garden color combinations is the mix of yellow flowers with gray foliage. Banishing yellow would let me feature plants with interesting gray foliage. Still, even after ditching yellow and most oranges, it still leaves reds and purples and whites and pinks and blues—and of course the all-important green!
But once a year, for a couple weeks, the color scheme will fall apart as a cluster of kahili ginger break into bloom with spectacular and amazingly fragrant spikes of yellow flowers. There’ll be nothing else yellow in that part of the garden, and your eye will go right to the lewdly sensuous rulebreakers. Once that quick philander off the color wheel passes, though, the garden will return to its former order. Only now it’ll be enriched by heady memories of its brief indiscretion. (Hmmm, sounds like a few plot lines I’ve encountered…)
Speaking of organizing something around the absence of certain colors—and things with plot lines, John and I were watching some of the bonus features on the DVD of The Hours. In one of them the costume and production designers were talking about how they arrived at a rule to help pull together the look of the film: Nothing red, and nothing blue. Partly as a result of that organizing principle the film sustains its earth-bound moodiness as the plot hops decades and moves back and forth from England to New York to California.
So…whether you’re planning a garden or shooting a movie, remember: Pay attention to the power of color!
July 13 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: color • color combinations | 2 Comments »
The garden is always changing. As plants mature and others come into bloom, I’m always seeing combinations of plants and interesting relationships between them. Here are a couple plant combinations in the yard that I’m particularly happy with.
This is Homeria collina, a South African bulb, with an unidentified rosette-forming succulent—quite likely a graptopetalum, possibly G. ‘Point Dexter’s’ or G. paraguayense—blooming in the foreground and cascading over a retaining wall. It’s right on the sidewalk in front of the house, and it’s extra-nice that you see the combination at eye-level.
I like how the purple-gray tones in the succulent complement the color of the block wall, and how its orangey tones work well with the homeria.
In the back yard there’s a different group of things converging, a bromeliad going out of bloom, some red Russian kale that’s just about ready to pick, plain white landscaping pansies that are nearing the end of their lifespans, and a Penstemon with its first flowers of the season. (The kale was much more purple just two weeks ago, before the weather started to warm up.)
In a couple of weeks these combinations will be gone, and there’ll be new ones that I’ve never seen before. All these joys of gardening!
April 08 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: color combinations • in bloom • plant combinations | No Comments »
