Foliage: The Living Palette - Part 3© Marge Talt
Dec 30, 1997
As those of you who drop by regularly have probably noticed, I've finally gotten a scanner and I've been playing with it. One of these days, I'll figure out the best way to use it. In the meantime, please bear with me if my page is slow to load. I'm a firm believer that "a picture is worth a thousand words". This is especially true when dealing with design elements like color, shape and texture that are so hard to describe and so easy to grasp when we see them.
This is the time of year to think about what we want in our gardens next season -- at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere, where winter is well under way. As we dream of our gardens and what we want to do, we need to keep our aesthetic tools in mind. Foliage is one of the primary tools available to those of us who garden in shade. With it, we can weave a living tapestry.
Gardening is an expression of our individual personalities, so the way each of us uses our foliage palettes of color, shape and texture will be as varied as we are. I'd be willing to bet that, given an identical set of plants, each of us would end up with a totally different border. This is one of the aspects of gardening that makes it so exciting.
Contrasts and Echoes
As I've said before, to my mind, it is the juxtaposition of foliage colors, shapes and textures, creating contrasts and echoes, that provide continuing interest in the garden. Because we're working with living plants, their relationships are in continual flux throughout the season. For instance, in part of my garden, Buxus sempervirens (Boxwood) underplanted with Pachysandra terminalis creates an echo of texture, continually green, a background, if you will; soothing, but unexciting. This same scene is given an added fillip during the growing season when Dennstaedtia punctiloba (Hay-scented Fern) begins to push its apple green, feathery fronds up through the Pachysandra (which doesn't mind this one bit). The basic color theme is still green, but the contrast in color, along with the foliage shape and texture provides a sensuous element lacking in the basic duo.
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Carol,I am relieved that the label does start with 's'! Was sure my eyes and brain weren't coordinating because if a plant ever looked like a Coleus, that one sure did! Hmmm...now, wonder what o ...
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The label is a long word beginning with s. But I asked the designer, who said it was a coleus. Back when the chicken scratch was fresh enough that I could decipher it I tried looking it up, and ...
-- posted by CarolWallace
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Yea Carol! It sure looked like one to me, but the label -- which is barely legible -- seemed to be a longer word starting with 's'. I enlarged it as far as possible and squinted for all I was worth, ...
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Marge, That mystery plant in the middle of the yellow border at the Philadelphia Flower Show is definitely a coleus. I know, because I fell in love with the border and wrote down all the plant names. ...
-- posted by CarolWallace
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