[ Lost in the Landscape ]

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 »