[ Lost in the Landscape ]

walk on by

Yel­low, white, blue, laven­der, pink…The front gar­den is crazy stri­dent right now and I like it. The flo­ral chaos is con­cen­trated along the side­walk in front of the house, where the plants present them­selves at eye-level for any­one walk­ing by.

If you were to check pass­ports on the plants you’d find a num­ber of Cal­i­for­nia ori­gin mixed in with oth­ers from Mediter­ranean cli­mates. Here’s the glo­ri­ously spraw­ley Nuttall’s milkvetch, Astra­galus nut­tal­lii, from the Cal­i­for­nia Cen­tral Coast, with a South African arc­to­tis hybrid.

The deep vio­let chia, Salvia colum­barae, hails from around here. The bright yel­low Jerusalem sage, Phlomis mono­cephala, from Turkey. The chia is annual but reseeds itself effi­ciently. After the plant dies back, its seed heads stay attrac­tive for sev­eral months. The phlomis starts to drop its leaves in summer’s drought but never goes entire bare. As it does that, the leaves turn more and yel­low­ish– grayish-green in color.

To help con­trol the flo­ral chaos, I’ve planted incor­po­rated a lot of each of these two plants, along with sev­eral of the milkvetch above.

The locally com­mon bulb, blue dicks, Dich­e­lostemma cap­i­ta­tum, with the salmon col­ored South African bulb, Home­ria col­lina behind it.

A yel­low cras­sula picks up on the yel­low theme as you walk by.

A cou­ple years ago I broad­cast some seed of South­ern California’s Phacelia par­ryi but never saw any make it to matu­rity. Just a week ago I noticed this, one of the last flow­ers on a small plant that has come up from that old broad­cast. I prob­a­bly would have missed it if it weren’t up at eye-level.

I tried shoot­ing a walk-by encounter of the front gar­den using my cellphone’s cam­corder fea­ture. Unfor­tu­nately the result looks like it was shot with a, well, cell­phone, and I’m too embar­rassed to share it. Too bad. Gar­dens are best explored in time and space and not in still pho­tos. Videos could give you a sense of explo­ration still pho­tos can’t. Well, I love a project, and get­ting a decent walk-by sequence will be another item on my ever-growing punchlist.

April 21 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: chaos • color combinations • flowers • mediterranean plants • native plants • raised beds | 12 Comments »

more december colors

Red and green seem to be the pre­dom­i­nant col­ors these days. Instead, how about a shot of hot magenta-pink against green? Of all my pitcher plants this sea­son Sar­race­nia Daina’s Delight is prob­a­bly look­ing the best of any of them.

Vivid col­ors aren’t the rule this late in the sea­son, with brown being the increas­ingly preva­lent shade. With fewer things like color to dis­tract you it’s a good time of year to con­cen­trate on the amaz­ing shapes these pitch­ers assume. In their brown state it’s eas­ier to see the lit­tle hairs on the leaves that direct the insects down into diges­tive juices.

For you color addicts there’s still a bit of color left. This species is Sar­race­nia rubra var. wher­ryi (a.k.a. S. alaba­men­sis var. wher­ryi.)

And for you color addicts who like a more tra­di­tional red and green combo, could you do any bet­ter than this? It’s a cross nick­named ‘W.C.’ by Jerry Adding­ton after Karen Oudean’s Wil­low Creek Nurs­ery, in honor of Karen bestow­ing on him this clone of the hybrid of S. (psittacina x rubra) x leu­co­phylla.

Hmmm…how about a cross between Daina’s Delight and W.C. for gor­geous late sea­son color and awe­some pat­tern­ing? If they both bloom next spring I just might have to make that cross and find out…

December 23 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: color • color combinations • fall • sarracenia • Sarracenia Daina's Delgiht • Sarracenia W.C. • seasons | 6 Comments »

well endowed landscaping

Here’s a lit­tle week­end quiz: Any guesses as to where I took this picture?

Does this sec­ond photo help?

Clue #1: It’s in Los Angeles.

Clue #2: It’s a uni­ver­sity campus.

Clue #3: The school col­ors are echoed in the flower col­ors of the landscaping.

If you’re not into uni­ver­si­ties and their col­ors the answer is USC, the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, where the plant­ing color scheme fea­tures the cam­pus col­ors of car­di­nal and gold. If you were to ask me for my opin­ion I’d offer that they’re prob­a­bly fine col­ors for foot­ball uni­forms but a lit­tle stri­dent for most gar­den sit­u­a­tions if they were the only col­ors you used. But the entire cam­pus was vibrat­ing with new plant­i­ngs of red salvias and yellow-orange marigolds, with a few left­over win­ter plant­i­ngs of pan­sies in sim­i­lar colors.

I men­tioned the plant­i­ngs to one of the cam­pus reg­u­lars I was up there to meet with. Appar­ently USC has an endow­ment (by what was prob­a­bly an enthu­si­as­tic alum­nus) to sup­ply bed­ding plants in the school colors.

From the themed sea­sonal color, to the lawns, to the hedges, to the fanat­i­cally clipped creep­ing fig around the Romanesque win­dows, to the trees planted in reg­i­mented rows, it’s so not my phi­los­o­phy of gardening.

But for an urban cam­pus set where the warm sea­son is just that, the tall trees pro­vide wel­come shade and the many benches set in the plant­i­ngs make for oppor­tu­ni­ties to sit and hold con­ver­sa­tions. And the style of the land­scape seems to come straight out of a tra­di­tion of how a cam­pus should look: neat, orderly, with a sense that many things of worth come from Europe.

My par­ents met on this cam­pus way back when. Look­ing at the com­fort­able but for­mal plant­i­ngs, I think I that can under­stand them a lit­tle bet­ter, the atti­tudes where they came from. Lift­ing my gaze to take in the tall sycamores, the mature mag­no­lias, I know that many of these trees were here when my par­ents attended the campus.

But as far as the team-themed bed­ding plants–Were they here then? I’m not so sure. I’ll have to ask my father about them, though it’s not the sort of detail he’s likely to remember.

A few plant­i­ngs flaunted col­ors other than the offi­cial school ones. The trees and lawns fea­tured green, of course, and here and there you’d find a non-conforming clus­ter of plants. I end with a cou­ple final shots of those.

May 02 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: color combinations • University of Southern California | 11 Comments »

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: baby blue eyes • blue • blue flowers • California poppy • color combinations • Escholzia californica • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • Nemophilia menziesii • orange • orange flowers • seasons • spring | 19 Comments »

one wall to go

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 »

controlled chaos

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 »

dramatic wall colors and plants

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 »

the little black book

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.

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!

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 »

inspired by nature: colors

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.

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.

Color by COLOURlovers


Color by COLOURlovers


Color by COLOURlovers

September 21 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • plant profiles | Tags: color combinations • eucalyptus • exfoliating bark • inspired by nature | No Comments »

pointillist garden color

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.

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 ]

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 »