Mother Nature's Paint Box

Beginning a garden design is like being given a giant paint box and a blank piece of paper. We know that we want to paint a beautiful picture - and that we may as well start with the green.

But once we have the idea of structure and texture in place, we get to the fun part - adding colors to that sea of mixed green. Fun - but nerve-wracking.

I was a coward with my own first garden. Getting the heights, shapes and cultural conditions of the plants right was hard enough - I couldn't be bothered worrying about whether the colors clashed. So I decided to make it simple. I'd just do all white.

Surprise! Whites clash. At least some of them do, There are blue-whites and grey-whites, yellow-whites and pinkish ones, and a few are actually pure white - and they don't necessarily all look good together. Put a white-white next to a yellow-white and it looks like you made a mistake. So I HAD to start sneaking in colors to mediate between the clashing whites.

White is a great color to start adding color to, because few colors really clash with it - so you will always have at least an acceptable pallette, if not a stunning one, as you can see at left. The white and silver border here is nice but bland. It has nothing to set it off - to really emphasize its "silverness" - until color is added. So that's what we'll set out to do in this article.

If you really look at your flower colors you'll find that painting in plants is actually easier than using pigment. Let the flower tell you what it wants as a neighbor.

Repeating grace notes
One interesting way to make sure your flower colors work together is to consider all their parts - petals, eyes and stamens, even leaves. A white flower may have red spots or stamens and so it would make sense to find a flower in that red to plant in combination with it. Last week I planted some beautiful osteospermum - glistening, white-white petals and a deep blue center. So I did what many blue-eyed people do to highlight that feature and planted something deep blue nearby. The two blues resonate off each other and the contrast between bright white and deep blue is stunning.

However, blue and white alone was a bit too sedate - so I looked at my blue flower - a tiny veronica, and discovered that it has tiny yellow stamens. So I added some 'Penny's Worth' daylilies in approximately the same shade of yellow to the grouping. Suddenly it's not mere harmony - we have a symphony! (And yes, I KNOW I'm mixing my metaphors.)

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