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.

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…

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.

Trees (and campus buildings) providing cooling shade

A flowering canopy, dozens of feet overhead

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.

Another renegade planting that didn’t get the cardinal and gold memo…

Acanthus mollis, not a sign of cardinal or gold

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!

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…

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…

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…

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

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’

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?

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

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

Shedding eucalyptus bark

New eucalyptus leaves

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 ?