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Is Your Garden a Fashion Victim?

© Carol Wallace

Last week I was reading an article about power gardeners - who really aren't gardeners at all. They are people who like the idea of having a garden - but rather than putting work into it, they put in money to get the largest, and the latest in plants. Everything, of course, must be planted in 'this year's colors' to coordinate with their ultra-stylish interiors.That way they could be assured that even their flower arrangements would be a perfect fashion statement.

That stopped me. This year's colors?? Fashion statements??? In the garden?? Don't tell me that even Mother Nature is prone to the vagaries of fashion!

In amazement, I headed for the Color Marketing Group to see if this could really be true.

Sho'nuff - plants have joined paint, wallpaper and fashion as part of the great color industry.

The Color Industry involves marketers whose business it is to forecast color trends. They look at cultural trends, influences from movies and TV, the environment and a passel of other things and make educated guesses on what the popular colors will be for the next few years. This information is sold to paint companies, car manufacturers, interior decorating-related industries and the fashion trade, who then have a better idea of how to color next year's products.

It's sort of a chicken-and-egg thing. The colors we get are the ones they predict, because everyone who is involved with manufacturing things that are tied to fashion listens and obeys. So whether these are really the colors people are craving is open to question - but they are the colors we get and learn to love.

Thanks to these color people you can now paint your house and upholster your furniture in colors that coordinate with your new clothes, which will also coordinate with your new car.

And then we owe thanks to some marketing people in the plant industry. They reasoned that people who have taken great care coordinating their interiors don't want to have to look out their windows at things that clash. So they went to work - and you can now buy plants specially formulated to coordinate with this year's colors!

Hybridizers, often working with annuals because they bloom so quickly from seed, go to work with plants that appear promising in giving them the required color traits. When their efforts are successful, those plants are vegetatively propagated and rushed to local garden centers everywhere. Then you, the lucky consumer, can scrap last year's garden scheme and plant a new one that is in the latest style.

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