The Green Border

The article in NYTimes yesterday about Absinthe, with all the descriptions of its color from pale celadon and shimmering aquamarine to extra virgin olive oil to dizzyingly garish shades that don’t exist in nature had me thinking on the subject of green foliage, in particular of course that other color also named after a French liqeur, Chartreuse. Because its on my mind.

These images are actually from June last year at the Wave Hill flower garden. There is a section where the borders are all shades of green. The photos were taken in early June which is pertinent only because it's actually a great way to approach May when there's more foliage than flower - having an interesting visual assortment of foliage like this is a great start.

In the right image, there's an interesting contrast in size and texture, the large leaves in the rear contrasting with the finer branched foliage in the front. I don't love large leaved chartreuse foliage though- it just seems too much in the space I'm working with. In the photo on the left, the color really stands out, contrasting sharply from the other plants, except I already have something really similar going on with the Spirea and the Cypress.

I'm thinking aloud because I have to find a couple of chartreuse-ish plants for this summer and this is making me analyze the choices. I do however really like that Caryopteris. It's Worcester Gold but I know from reading Hayefield, Nan Ondra's blog that the one I really really want is Sunshine Blue which is similar, retains more of it's yellow color, flowers later and with richer purple-blue flowers. Her blog is probably the best, certainly the most interesting source of information about foliage color, her current post is all about Yellow. Another plant I liked at wave Hill was the Ornamental Comfrey. So many choices, so little time.

+ OGMedia:Tomato Seedlings

+ OccasionalOasis:Sansula

Balance

I bought a plant yesterday at the farmers market a Solanum Jasminoides Aurea, says the label, which I could barely find any information about on the internets probably because it might be more often referred to as Solanum Jasminoides Variegata, that took a while. Then I went and checked again the zone information for Mamaroneck which is somewhere between a 6 and a 7, I forget, I have to go back to this article that reminds me that it might be more a 7. Which doesn't help because Variegata needs zone 9 maybe 8.

Anyways all this left brain activity made me parched for something completely the opposite so I dug up a couple of photos from Wave Hill last year and messed with it. Flowers lost all their botanical names- they just became little impressionistic dots, the zoneless weather is caught eternally between hazy sunshine and dreamy mist. That's better.

In fact, I really have to keep all this in perspective, yes I must compost, sow more seeds, remember to prune the phlox and the sedum in the coming weeks but, I mustn't forget to sit back, squint my eyes blur all the colors and sort of do nothing at all- especially anything that resembles a chore. That's what i really like about gardening, the pointless impractical daydreaming part that I squeeze in between the practical bits.

I'm not alone, this early report on the Chelsea Flower show confirms that ethereal charm and magic and mystery are essential trends. I'll drink to that, nothing better than a little whimsy and some poetry to balance all this talk of compost and vegetables.

Pastel Pretty

It's difficult not to associate pastels with pretty as in pretty in pink or Gertrude Jekyll's pretty pastel drifts. Or classical or romantic, so not surprisingly in my own efforts at color schemes I've been drawn to the more unusual. It was actually at Sissinghurst that I first encountered the idea you could color a garden in quite a radical way, and it wasn't the White Garden, it was the Cottage Garden.

It was particularly radical because it was a 'cottage' garden - traditionally a dreamy romantic, pastel picture. Instead, Vita used pungent, spice colors, oranges and yellows contrasted with dark yews, bronze fennel and the verdigris of a huge copper container. It was irreverent and genius. I saw it at the end of the day when the light darkened and softened everything. It glinted off the cottage windows and cast a dark and golden magic spell that I carry in my head in vivid detail to this day. If the rose garden started me off on the notion that gardening was really something I wanted to get into, then the cottage garden is the one, of all the gardens I have visited, that I have tried to emulate the most.

Not that I don't enjoy looking at pretty pastels in a garden in fact here are three great images from the past few weeks, a drift of pink achillea and a cloud of lemon yellow santolina billowing onto a path, both at Wave Hill. In Mamaroneck powder puff pink spirea and porcelain blue hydrangea greet visitors at the front of the house.

Red Infatuation

I live for moments like this. I was at the Wave Hill garden and saw two plants in context there that triggered a profound infatuation - a Dianthus that was the deepest, darkest red and a Smokebush that went from a purplish red to blood Crimson. They are a Dianthus Barbatus "Heart Attack" (I'm pretty sure) and a Cotinus Coggyria'Royal Purple" (I read the label).

Anyone working with color will tell you- if you want to accentuate a particular color- manipulate the colors next to it. The richness and darkness of these reds are without doubt accentuated by the white flowers they co habit with. I'm not the biggest fan of white flowers but I like the work they do here and you can see how, mixed with intermediate colors in the red/magenta range, they tell a bigger story. The other thing I like here is how the greens look, they look sharper somehow for the same reason , they're next to the color that they are diammetrically opposed to on the color wheel- red.

So I have two plants to look for and the reason I live for these moments-seriously good new color ideas.

+ Occasional Oasis:Inside Out

A View of Trees

With the recent media about the Billion Tree planting initiative by the UN and the follow up in NYC of ten thousand trees soon to be added to the Manhattan landscape, I couldn't help thinking back on this view of trees, pictured above taken at Wave Hill last summer. The view is from the cafe terrace, dominated by this one majestic tree. I took quite a few photos of this view but wasn't really struck by any of them- none of them seemed to evoke the actual experience of the moment.

Coincidentally I happened to come across this week some photogravure images with a really blue/green cast and decided to process the images along these lines and I really like the result. Its more dream like and more dense. It feels more like the actual experience of being there when a view like that encourages you to slip away from focussing on the details of your surroundings and you drift into random thoughts and memories of other days like this.

Other Gardeners

At Wave Hill garden I happened to take this photo of two gardeners at work- a perfect image to illustrate a post about the sidebar links to "Other Gardeners". They are of course links to two great blog directories- the first being Garden Voices - a great selection of posts from an interesting list of Gardening Blogs and the second being the Garden Blog Directory of Cold Climate Gardening- one of my favorite gardening blogs. Gardeners I've also found, are such nice people always ready to lend a hand, and this was no different with Caren of A Gardening Year and Karen of Cold Climate Gardening who were kind enough to include me in their directories mentioned above- so this a thank you to them for bringing many new visitors to this site and also for their kind and encouraging words.

I happen to know that the gardener on the right is John Emmanuel- the Assistant Director of Horticulture at Wave Hill. I know this because I picked up a copy of the Wave Hill News and there was a story and photo of him inside. I learnt that he was to retire at the end of 2007 and as an interesting layer to this post about other gardeners, on his very first visit to Wave Hill as a young man, he met by chance T.H.Everett founder of the New York Botanical Garden School of Horticulture, taking photographs in the Wild Garden- who advised him that he could make a good living as a gardener.