I posted back in December that I really liked Pantone's color of the year a blue purple that I had an interest in. I want to expand on that with a theme I'm calling Mood indigo. Indigo is technically defined as the color between blue and violet so I'm using that term loosely to look at flowers that span the color range between blue and purple.
Sometimes going back to a subject reinforces certain ideas- one here is that blue flowers look really good together in a monochromatic border. This is borne out in some of the private gardens in Provincetown pictured here as well as the Shakespeare garden in Central Park. Its interesting to read that this held true back in 1901 when Old Time Gardens was published. See this excerpt- where the author reknown North Eastern gardener Alice Morse Earle, writes about "The Blue Border" and names many plants pictured above and many more.
I've been using this blue purple in my work recently - combining it with yellows that tend green and oranges that tend yellow. If you look at page 4 with the Alchemilla Mollis and and at page 6 with the purplish asters with yellow, orange-ish eyes, you can see how well these colors harmonize. One thing I noticed in the moment of taking some of those photos was how luminous the bluer end of this range looks in shade or contrasted against a dark wall or background- see the delphiniums on page 11 or the pansies at the feet of the hostas on page 16. The best example is actuallly the last page- the photo doesn't really do justice to how those Tradescantia glowed in the deep shade. Something that occured to me after I put the photo series together is how much I like the purple Artichoke and Clematis Jackmanii against a white wall or paintwork on pages 12 and 13.
Of all the gardens, I really liked the part of the Shakespeare garden where this color palette was planted in almost a glen like setting with plenty of cool upright ferns, the sculptural shapes of the purplish alliums and intense shots of color from the pansies. The overall effect was beautiful but calming and meditative.
