I like to use a little of each school of thought in my own garden. The use of native plants is a wonderful way to enrich our gardens, and keeps us mindful of our role as good stewards of the earth. The addition of long-loved specimens brings our cultural heritage into complimentary play with native plantings. Add your favorite new introduction to this picture, and you have a full range of garden delights.
This spring, I had a chance to retrieve some native woodland trout lilies-or "dog toothed violets" (erythronium umbicullatum) on a plant rescue arranged by the Georgia Native Plant Society. These hardy minor bulbs have yellow flowers, smooth with red, pink, green and gray mottled leaves. Their placement in my woody garden has added an exclamation point to the existing plantings of pulmonaria, forget-me-not, and a huge "Spectabilis" pink bleeding heart. I've also tossed in some small pale pink calla lilly bulbs, just to add another height level in this grouping. Later in the season. the bleeding heart will die back, and pink "Sprite" astilbe will pick up the color in Cuban oregano I'll overplant, as the the trout lily leaves die back.
I also brought a native viburnum--species unknown, but probably white flowering- from the resuce. It's behind the grouping described above. It has been cut back hard (by about two-thirds of its' original size) and with plenty of water and a little attention, it will make my garden its' new home.
This is the kind of color and texture arrangement I like to call "smile back and flirt". Repetition and contrast make all the difference in terms of continuing interest in a given area.
How you manage to do this on your garden depends on the frost and bloom times you experience where you live. One of my favorite antique watercolors (found in my in-laws basement..they bought it for the frame only!) shows yellow primrose, galax, and arrowroot fern thriving together in a woodland. It's lovely, but it has to be set in New England for these specimens to appear as they do.
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