nothing yellow

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: • | 2 Comments »

april plant combinations

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: • • | No Comments »

« Prev