Piet Oudolf: Meadow Maker – Part One

Posted on March 20, 2017 by Janet

It was early April 1999, and we were visiting Hummelo in the Netherlands so I could talk with Piet Oudolf and see his garden. I had read his books and followed his burgeoning design career with interest. Given my childhood love of wild places, I was always more interested in designers who embraced a naturalist ethos and synthesized that into their work, whether purely aesthetic or ecology-based. When we visited Hummelo, I had just finished an in-depth magazine profile on Michael Hough, a seminal member of the mid-20^th century ecological landscape movement. Scotland-born Michael had been a student of Ian McHarg (Design With Nature) at Edinburgh’s College of Art and later at the University of Pennsylvania, before founding the University of Toronto’s Undergraduate program in Landscape Architecture, then moving to York University to teach in their fledgling Environmental Studies program and publish his own book, Cities and Natural Process. Later on this trip, we would visit the botanical garden at Leiden and Ecolonia in Alphen aan den Rijn, below, an experimental housing development whose architecture, landscape, utilities and infrastructure had been built earlier that decade using principles of ecological design.

Hummelo

The Oudolfs were generous in greeting us. Anja still ran the nursery then, Kwekerij Oudolf with its goddess Flora…..

….. and retail customers were busy buying the plants that the Oudolfs raised to use in Piet’s designs. In time, other Dutch growers would become adventurous in their plant introductions; this fact, combined with the demands of Piet’s business and Anja’s busy schedule accommodating groups wanting to tour the garden eventually caused the Oudolfs to close the nursery and build a studio in its place.

We toured the garden; as it was early spring, not much was in bloom, but the hellebores and wild phlox were lovely.

The Stachys byzantina ellipses were still there, along with the famous yew towers and undulating yew hedges which would later be damaged by flooding. Both features were eventually removed and this garden was planted with sweeping perennials.

The trial beds were impressively ordered – and vital in teaching Piet how various perennials performed: their hardiness, floriferousness, optimal companions, seedhead properties, pollinator attraction, winter persistence, etc.

It was still very much a place where the Oudolfs worked as a team to expand and improve the palette of plants, but there were abundant touches of simple domesticity.

Piet graciously posed for my camera at a picnic table in a little enclosed garden surrounded by spring-flowering shrubs.

Then we said farewell and headed off to the nearby garden of Eugénie van Weede at Huis Bingerden, below. At the time of our visit, Eugénie been holding her International Specialist Nursery Days, a 3-day June plant fair attracting thousands of visitors, for four years. (In 2016, there were 37 exhibitors.) In turn, her inspiration came from Piet and Anja Oudolf, who had held their own annual Hummelo Open Days (later Grass Days) beginning in 1983. By the mid-1990s, visitors numbered in the thousands. Wrote Piet in his rich memoir Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life, by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury (The Monacelli Press, 2015): “Our idea was to bring people together. Of course we wanted to create some income, but thought it would also be a good idea to bring a selection of growers who share the same interest in plants, as an advertisement for all of us.” It was Piet Oudolf, seedman Rob Leopold and Piet’s original partner, nurseryman Romke van de Kaa (formerly Christopher Lloyd’s head gardener in the 1970s) — the men she calls her three ‘godfathers’ — who advised Eugénie on the nurseries she should include in her Nursery Days.

Fast-forward 15 years to a lovely day in August 2014, and there I was photographing the Piet Oudolf-designed entry border at my own local Toronto Botanical Garden, as I’ve been doing regularly for more than a decade. Even though I recall my visit to Hummelo with pleasure, my relationship with the entry border feels less like a connection to the Netherlands than an arrow that points right back to my childhood. A childhood spent in a meadow.

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You Can Take the Child Out of the Meadow….

How does one become a meadow maker? Perhaps it might happen through sheer neglect: abandoning a plot of land to flowering weeds and long grasses which, through a stretch of imagination, might eventually approximate a reasonably attractive community of plants. Though leaving meadow-making to serendipity rarely achieves satisfactory results, it was nevertheless a meadow of happenstance that became my first intimate connection with nature and, by extension, with gardening. For it was an old field across the road from my childhood home in Victoria, B.C., the one just behind the trees at left that you can’t make out in this photo….

…. that taught me how Spanish bluebells and English daisies emerged in spring as grasses turn green; how California poppies preferred the stony ground to the rich, damp soil where western buttercups grew, the ones we held under our chins to see who liked butter best.

Oxeye daisies and horsetails, bindweed, tansy and purple clover: these were the meadow weeds I came to love. As little as I was, I felt at home in that chaotic wildness, the old field that promised adventure – even the spittle-bugs that brushed our cheeks as we crawled through the grasses on all fours playing hide-and-seek.

If, as landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy contends in her 1995 classic The Inward Garden, the joyful, treasured places of our childhood become the environments we yearn for as adults, my Victoria field was the idyll I tried to recreate a half-century later in the wild front garden of our Toronto home, below, …..

….. and in the meadows of our cottage at Lake Muskoka….

….. where bees and butterflies and birds are welcomed.

But meadow-making, for me, though it became somewhat more ‘designed’ and much more interesting than conventional gardening, never approached an art form. It was more about capturing a little corner of ‘wildness’ outside my door. Making a meadow that appears to be wild but is ‘enhanced nature’, that relies on deep knowledge for its plant palette and a wealth of experiment for its dynamic combinations: that is the work of a master. And that is how Piet Oudolf came to design the entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG).

But first, let’s back up a little to 2006.

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Toronto Botanical Garden

In the early 2000’s, when Toronto’s Civic Garden Centre was being transformed from a small, horticulture-related institution to the Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG), a series of 17 themed gardens were designed to skirt around the new LEED building and extend out into the modest 4-acre property. . (You can see my seasonal galleries of all these gardens on the TBG’s website). Landscape architects for some of the gardens included PMA Landscape Architects Ltd. and Sparling Landscape Architects. For the prominent entry walk along the entrance driveway and the long south wall of the building, funding was provided by the Garden Club of Toronto to commission Toronto landscape architect Martin Wade of MWLA, below left, and Piet Oudolf, right, to collaborate on the hardscape and plant design.

Garden club member Nancy Laurie (who provided these photographs of the planting) was intimately involved with the beginning of the garden. As she recalls: “The club was asked to design and install a perennial garden that welcomed visitors into a botanical garden. The parameters of the garden area were predetermined by the TBG and the space was limited in height and width variations. It was surrounded by two parking lots, sidewalks and a building. It would most likely be viewed first by many from inside a moving car. In addition, the other gardens that would eventually make up the new Toronto Botanical Gardens would be of a more formal design. This garden had to stand out from the others. Be different. Announce this is as an avant botanical garden. Martin Wade proposed including the internationally acclaimed perennial designer Piet Oudolf to join the project as a consultant specifically for the planting design and selection of plants using his much admired naturalistic interpretation of a traditional perennial border garden.”

Apart from having read some of Piet’s books on plant design and hearing him speak at conferences, Nancy had also helped organize several two-day symposiums on the theme of the natural garden. “So I was personally very keen to make this ‘new’ garden paradigm a key element in our new entrance garden,” she recalls. “The garden world of the 1990’s and early 2000’s was embracing a more modern approach to the traditional formal English-style perennial garden. Piet Oudolf’s alternative style is characterized by naturalistic plantings, both in techniques and style, and using plant material that suited the terrain, climate and growing conditions already present in the site. He was recognized at the time as the master of the ‘new perspective of planting’ to paraphrase the title of one of his books. He was ‘The Man’.”

The plant design was complete and ready for reference.

With the hardscaping and rough grading having been done earlier that spring, the garden was ready for planting. But first there were some preliminary steps. The garden was divided into precise grids….

………which would facilitate transference of the design outlines onto the ground.

Once the grid was finished, the outline of the plant groupings themselves was sprayed onto the surface of the soil with a non-toxic paint…..

…..like a plant-by-number guide.

The Garden Club had teams of planting volunteers ready and they listened to words of wisdom from Piet before starting. Says Nancy Laurie: “The committee gained enormous experience working through this project. At its completion, I prepared a process paper on how to organize and use volunteers to help install a large garden project under the leadership of a landscape architect. Martin Wade used the suggestions to direct the volunteers at his installation of several new gardens at the Royal Botanical Garden the following year.”

Then it was out into the garden. Most of the plants were Heritage Perennials from the Ontario division of Valleybrook Gardens.

As Nancy recalls: “Martin Wade managed the process of planting the garden with the help of Garden Club volunteers. Piet was on site for the first planting day to offer suggestions and help. He conferred with Martin and often stepped into the garden with the volunteers to show them how to properly plant a specific variety.”

Nancy Laurie still recalls Piet’s planting lessons from that day.

When ready to plant, start at one end of the garden and move backwards so that the soil does not get compacted with foot traffic. Use planks of wood to walk on especially if the soil is wet so it does not compact.
Working in one grid area, dig all of the holes for one plant variety.
Loosen the soil around the planting hole several inches larger than the plant root system. Step back and look to see if the planting area is what it looks like on the plan. Adjust if needed before actually installing the plants.

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The entry walk was transformed that June into a fluttering, buzzing, verdant place of great beauty, different in all seasons, and indeed different from year to year, as the plants intermingled, possibly even more than their designer intended, and a few disappeared eventually, to be replaced by others. Let’s take a look at a small area, just in front of the glass screen dividing the border from the Floral Hall courtyard just to the north. Here it is on Piet’s plan.

Here’s the area as it looked in early spring 2006, with its new espaliered ‘Donald Wyman’ crabapples and coppery paperbark maples (Acer griseum).

Now look at it in May 2012, below. Seasonal spring bulbs are part of the changing display in the garden and, when carefully planted, they don’t affect the emergence of the perennials in Piet’s design.

Here it is in June 2011 with the Geranium psilostemon and Astrantia ‘Roma’ flowering amidst the lush green foliage of Deschampsia caespitosa.

I captured this autumn scene in October 2009, with the Deschampsia in flower and toad lilies (Tricyrtis formosa ‘Samurai’) blooming at left.

The genius of the entry garden, for me, especially in the early years when the perennials had not yet seeded about and intermingled, was that it transformed itself through the seasons — especially evident with the ornamental grasses.

Here’s my video of more of the seasonal changes in various parts of the garden.

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Before I move on to more seasonal scenes from the garden, I’d like to acknowledge the hard work of former head gardener Sandra Pella, her assistant gardeners and former TBG horticulturist Paul Zammit, who oversaw the demanding maintenance of the entry garden on a shoestring budget, and with great enthusiasm.

I was there to photograph it each spring….

……when the brilliance of the tulips, daffodils and small bulbs was especially welcome after the long winter we have in Toronto.

Families of donors to the garden help to plant new bulbs each autumn, changing the show annually. The emerging perennials are unaffected by the bulbs growing in their midst.

Late spring featured the big, purple heads of alliums…..

…… and lush peonies like ‘Krinkled White’, here with willow-leaf bluestar (Amsonia tabernaemontana var. salicifolia)…..

….. and ‘Bowl of Beauty’, with mauve Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone’, left and the white form of the mourning widow geranium (G. phaeum f. album) behind …..

…. and stunning red ‘Buckeye Belle’ with Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’ in the background.

But the summer months are when the Oudolf garden hits its stride, as the lush, ornamental grasses begin to fountain around the stems of the flowering perennials. In early summer, deep-red Knautia macedonica pops out like dots in a pointillist painting.

I love knautia for its long flowering season and its attractiveness to all kinds of bees.

Here are three Oudolf favourites: from rear, mauve ‘Fascination’ Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum), ‘Blue Fortune’ anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) and the lime-green, needled leaves of Arkansas bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii), half-way between its pale-blue spring flowers and brilliant gold fall colour.

A little later comes the beautiful echinacea show, here with the salmon daylily Hemerocallis ‘Pardon Me’ and ‘Veitch’s Blue’ globe thistle (Echinops ritro), which is…..

….. another exceptional bee plant.

August is my favourite time in the garden, as the grasses reach their stately heights and the late-season perennials flower. Here’s a little vignette of what you see as you do the entry walk in early-mid August: violet spikes of blazing star (Liatris spicata); creamy-white rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium); the lush, burgundy flowers of the various Joe Pye weeds (Eutrochium sp.); the small, dark-red wands of burnet(Sanguisorba sp.); and echinaceas.

Below we have the self-seeding annual Verbena bonariensis, left, leadplant (Amorpha canescens) past its flowering, centre, and red-spiked ‘Firetail’ persicaria (P. amplexicaulis) at right.

By October, the Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) on the stone wall of the Raymond Moriyama-designed Flower Hall has turned bright red and the seedheads and fall colour of the big grasses in the Oudolf border take centre stage, along with a few asters and goldenrods that have sneaked into the border from other parts of the botanical garden.

One year, aromatic aster Symphyotrichum oblongifolium ‘October Skies’, below, native to the central and eastern United States, looked stunning punctuated with echinacea seedheads. But this lovely aster, used by Piet at Lurie Garden in Chicago, seems to have diminished in subsequent years, part of the inevitable reality of plant experimentation, something to which Piet Oudolf has paid great attention over the decades.

Perennial seedheads are an important part of the seasonal show in the garden; these are the mocha-brown October seedheads of the yarrow Achillea millefolium ‘Walther Funcke’, with silvery Perovskia atriplicifolia ‘Little Spire’ at right and bronze Astilbe ‘Purpurlanze’ in the background.

And provided that repeated heavy, wet snowfalls do not knock down the plants and ruin the show, the entry garden demonstrates the beauty of the persistent seedheads and stems throughout winter. The grass at left is Korean feather grass (Calamagrostis brachytricha).

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Plants and Memories

Many of the plants in the entry garden are part of Piet Oudolf’s personal history: breeding successes of the German or Dutch plantsmen who were part of his circle – and horticultural education – since the beginning of his design career and life in Hummelo. People like Ernst Pagels (1913-2007), of Leer, himself a student of Karl Foerster, the iconic nurseryman who sheltered Jews in his nursery during the Second World War and whose name is memorialized in a well-known feather reed grass (Calamagrosis x acutiflora). As explained in Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life, in the 1980s Piet Oudolf travelled often across the border into Germany to visit Pagels at his nursery where they would talk plants. “We went to get the newest plants, and to bring them home…. and we exchanged a lot.” Among the Ernst Pagels jewels that live in the TBG’s entry garden are Achillea ‘Walther Funcke’….

…. Astilbe chinensis var. tacquetii ‘Purpurlanze’ and Stachys officinalis ‘Hummelo’ …..

…. Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone’……

…. and Salvia nemorosa ‘Amethyst’, shown here with Allium cristophii.

Piet’s Dutch friend and fellow plantsman Coen Jansen is responsible for the tall meadowrue Thalictrum ‘Elin’.

And his German colleague Cassian Schmidt, director of the famous garden at Hermannshof, (thanks Tony Spencer for that great blog entry) has his own name memorialized in the beautiful, Kurt Bluemel-raised fountain grass Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Cassian’, shown here with the statice Limonium latifolium…..

As for Piet Oudolf himself, long before he designed the planting of the TBG’s entry border, he was selecting his own plants and registering them. In 1998, the year before I visited him at Hummelo, he joined with two other growers to launch their company Future Plants, “to market their introductions and to protect their work through Plant Breeder’s Rights.” As explained in Hummelo: A Journey…, these plants were often put into production in the U.S. before Dutch nurseries had started to raise them. Among the Piet Oudolf-propagated plants in the entry garden are the pale-mauve hybrid monkshood Aconitum ‘Stainless Steel’….

……. Astrantia major ‘Roma’…..

….. Echinacea purpurea ‘Vintage Wine’, with its lovely dark stems….

….. Monarda ‘Scorpion’…..

….. Perovskia atriplicifolia ‘Little Spire’, a compact Russian sage shown below with Calamintha nepeta (a fabulous bee combo!)…..

….. Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firedance’…..

….. Salvia ‘Madeline’…..

….. Salvia verticillata ‘Purple Rain’ (this photo with Achillea ‘Anthea’ was made at the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, near Toronto) …..

…. and finally the spectacular Culver’s root Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Fascination’, given its tongue-in-cheek name by Piet Oudolf because of its genetic tendency to ‘fasciation’, a flattening of the flower spike.

That concludes the first part of my two-part blog on the entry garden at the Toronto Botanical Garden. In Part Two, I drill down into Piet Oudolf’s garden plan to show you some terrific plant combinations, and some of my favourite plants and why.

PS – if you’re a fan of New York’s High Line, I have photographed the Oudolf plantings there in three seasons, and blogged about a few of those visits as well. Here’s the High Line in early May and a two-part blog on the High Line in mid-June.

This summer, I’m looking forward to visiting Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park.

Silver Lustre in the Garden

Posted on December 19, 2016 by Janet

A little holiday song, for those who’ve stuck it out through my Twelve Months of Colour blogs in 2016:

Silver belles, silver belles,
It’s Christmas time in the city.
Ding-a-ling?? No, they don’t ring,
My “Silver Belles” just look pretty.

Yes, we’re finally in December, and as befits the tinsel month in my year-long celebration of monthly colour themes, I’ve pulled together a treasure box filled with pieces of silver (and some nice blue-greys) for your garden. You should know that I’m a big fan of grey, especially mixed with that little dash of brown that tips it into ‘taupe’. In fact, my house is painted that colour, and my deck and fence are stained a darker shade of stone-grey. It is a beautiful background for all plants.

If you add a little blue-green to silvery-gray, you get a colour we often describe as “glaucous”. That word has travelled a long way since it was first used by the Greeks, including Homer, as glaukos to mean “gleaming, silvery”. In Latin, it took on the meaning “bluish-green”, and in the 15h century, the Middle English word glauk meant “bluish-green, gray”. That fits the color of luscious Tuscan kale, below.

So we’ll look at some lovely plants with glaucous foliage as well.

Shrubs & Trees

Let’s begin with a few trees and shrubs. Weeping willowleaf pear (Pyrus salicifolia ‘Pendula’) is a pretty little (20 ft – 7 m) tree with silvery-grey foliage. Here it is at Victoria’s Horticulture Centre of the Pacific, underplanted with Allium ‘Purple Sensation’.

Then we have a true willow, dwarf blue Arctic willow (Salix purpurea ‘Nana’). This is a very hardy, useful shrub, standing about 5 feet (1.5 m) tall and wide, that will lend its soft greyish texture to a variety of applications, including as hedging or a filler.

As for conifers, there are lots of blue junipers and silver firs, and of course, blue spruces. For a big silvery tree, perhaps none is as stately as the concolor or white fir (Abies concolor ‘Candicans’).

If you want a cool blue-grey spruce at garden level, consider Picea pungens ‘Glauca Procumbens’.

And I love the look of Juniperus conferta ‘Blue Pacific’, especially as it takes on mauve hues in winter, below, along with Sedum rupestre ‘Angelina’.

Speaking of winter, there’s even a shrub with silvery fruit that persists into winter: Northern bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica).

Though we often think of lavender as perennial, it is actually a sub-shrub. English lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) has greyish-blue foliage, and even the commonly available cultivars like ‘Hidcote’ and ‘Munstead’ will provide a good colour contrast, as they do edging this beautiful potager.

But if you want a really silvery, hardy lavender, try ‘Silver Mist’, shown below contrasting with a bronze carex.

And if you are in a climate where you can grow the more tender Spanish lavender (Lavandula stoechas), there’s a gorgeous silver-leaved cultivar called ‘Anouk’.

Perennials

Who hasn’t seen lamb’s-ears in a perennial border? And who hasn’t questioned whether the plant’s name should be a single lamb or a flock? Kidding aside, using hardy lamb’s-ears (Stachys byzantina) is one of the easiest ways to inject a note of silver into the garden. Here it is with lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis) at Burlington, Ontario’s Royal Botanical Gardens …..

… and fronting a June border at Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Garden.

I love the way my pal Marnie White intersperses her lamb’s-ears with pink portulaca.

Sea holly has a few beautiful silver forms; this is Eryngium giganteum ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’ with liatris and switch grass (Panicum virgatum) at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) has several cultivars with lovely silvery variegation. This is ‘Jack Frost’.

Russian sage (Salvia yangii, formerly Perovskia) has fine silver foliage. Here it is with Liatris spicata.

And this is Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’ creating a silvery pool at the edge of a border.

In the fern world, luscious Japanese painted fern (Athyrium niponicum var. pictum) is literally ‘painted’ with silver variegation. The stunning cultivar below is ‘Pewter Lace’.

Though they don’t come in pure silver, there are many blue-grey hostas to add texture to a shaded or semi-shaded place. At the Toronto Botanical Garden, I love the juxtaposition of Hosta ‘Blue Angel’ with the silvery-blue glass screen behind it.

Here is an assortment of blue-grey hostas.

1 – Ultramarine; 2 – First Frost; 3 – Fragrant Blue; 4 – Earth Angel; 5 – Paradise Joyce; 6 – Halcyon.

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With their rainbow foliage colour and myriad leaf markings, heucheras have become a plant breeder’s bonanza in the past few decades. Below are ‘Rave On’ (left) and ‘Silver Scrolls’ (right).

Euphorbias also offer delectable silver makings. Though it’s borderline-hardy where I garden in Toronto, I do love Euphorbia characias ‘Tasmanian Tiger’.

The silvery foliage of Scotch thistle (Onopordum acanthium) can be quite stunning, but careful it doesn’t escape – clip those flowers before they go to seed.

Grasses

Blue-grey grasses abound. Here’s Festuca glauca ‘Blue Glow’ with berried cotoneaster and silvery Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) behind.

This is ‘Heavy Metal’ switch grass (Panicum virgatum) – one of my favourites.

Little bluestem is a wonderful native prairie grass, and ‘Prairie Blues’ has a more pronounced silvery-blue hue.

‘Wind Dancer’ love grass (Eragrostis elliotii) is hardy only to USDA Zone 6, but I’ve seen it used as an annual grass to lovely effect.

Tender Shrubs, Annuals & Tropicals

Montreal Botanical Garden knows how to create wonderful knots and parterres with silvery plants. This is the tender grass Melinis nerviglumis ‘Savannah’ (ruby grass – USDA Zone 8-10) with Angelonia ‘Serena Purple’.

…. and this is Cerastium ‘Columnae Silberteppich’ with lantana.

Montreal Botanical’s Herb Garden has also used silvery herbs in formal design schemes over the years. The tapestry-like knot garden below features the sages (Salvia officinalis) ‘Berrgarten’ and variegated ‘Icterina’ in the circle, along with hedge germander (Teucrium chamaedrys) with the pink flowers; clipped lavender and santolina are in the background.

Here’s a closer look at santolina or cotton thistle (Santolina chamacyparissus) in flower. Its ease of shearing makes it a prime candidate for parterres and knots, but it is only hardy to USDA Zone 6.

There are several Mediterranean plants that fit our silvery-blue theme. A tender perennial (USDA Zone 8) with silver foliage that can be used as a drought-tolerant annual is Greek mountain tea (Sideritis syriaca).

And Senecio viravira or silver groundsel has textural foliage.

Isn’t this combination at the Niagara Botanical Gardens beautiful? The big, felted silver leaves of Salvia argentea with Tradescantia spathacea ‘Tricolor’ seem made for each other.

Also at Niagara Botanical one summer, I loved this juxtaposition of blue-grey cardoon (Cynara cardunculus) with the cascading silvery Dichondra argentea in the hanging baskets behind.

Speaking of dichondra, here it is at the Toronto Botanical Garden paired with Centaurea gymnocarpa ‘Colchester White’. This, of course, is the work of the TBG’s container wizard Paul Zammit.

Dusty miller (Centaurea cineraria) is an old-fashioned annual that’s easy to source and offers a lovely hit of silver, as with this rich autumn combination of dusty miller and ornamental cabbages.

We mustn’t forget the spectacular leaves of the newer Rex begonias like ‘Escargot’, below, many of which have silver markings.

There are loads of silvery succulents available, because being silver-grey (reflecting the sun) and being succulent (storing your own water in your leaves) are both adaptations to plants growing in extreme hot and dry environments. I loved this combination of Kalanchoe pumila ‘Quicksilver’ and Senecio serpens at Eye of the Day Garden Center in Carpinteria, California.

This pairing of blue sticks (Senecio mandraliscae) with Scaevola aemula at the Montreal Botanical Garden was simple, yet dramatic.

And the gorgeous container below was in the former Vancouver garden of garden guru Tom Hobbs and Brent Beattie, owners of Vancouver’s Southlands Nursery. It features Echeveria elegans, salmon-red Sedum rubrotinctum and silvery parrot feather (Tanacetum densum), along with astelia in the centre.

Succulents have been used extensively over the years by Paul Zammit at the Toronto Botanical Garden. Check out this silvery monochrome masterpiece.

And finally, this gorgeous windowbox from the TBG, with its luscious mix of silver echeverias, aptenias, kalanchoes, senecios, rhipsalis and more, all enhanced by the dwarf Arctic willow hedging around it.

With that, I finish my monthly 2016 exploration of the garden paintbox. But not to worry! 2017 is a whole new ballgame, and there will be garden colour galore (plus the odd travel journal and personal reminiscence) throughout the coming year.

A November Wine Tasting

Posted on November 29, 2016 by Janet

This is my month to explore that dark, rich, full-bodied, dowager great-aunt of ‘red’ – otherwise known as ‘wine’. Or burgundy, if you like. Like its viticulture companion, a little wine in the garden goes a long way. Overdo it and you might not like the heavy feeling that results. But a little sip here and there adds depth and elegance to the garden. So let’s sample a few good vintages, shall we?

In my part of the world, spring wines are quite common, given that the Lenten roses or hellebores are flowering in profusion. This is Helleborus ‘Blue Lady’.

There are a few excellent wine-red tulips for later in spring, like the lovely lily-flowered tulip ‘Burgundy’, below.

And I loved this combination of the bicolour Triumph tulip ‘Gavota’ and dark ‘Queen of Night’ at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

I know I might have included the late-flowered tulip ‘Queen of Night’ in my blog on ‘black’ flowers, but it often shows with more red. This is that sensuous tulip spangled through an uncharacteristically wild bulb planting in the very formal Jardin des Tuileries in Paris. Notice how the repetition of the dark colour carries your eye up through the various beds, unifying them and lending them a somewhat ‘designed’ feeling in keeping with the place.

One of the more elegant little spring bulbs is snakeshead fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris). Apart from the checkered, wine-red species, there is a white form as well.

Of all the small trees for gardens, the biggest choice in red-leafed selections can be found in Japanese maples. This is the highly regarded Acer palmatum var. dissectum ‘Inaba-shidare’ at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

But the ubiquitous ‘Bloodgood’ Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) also puts on a beautiful wine-red show throughout summer, and colours beautifully to bright scarlet in fall. Here it is with the Triumph tulip ‘Boston’ in the Mary Fisher Spring Garden at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

One of the best shrubs for adding deep wine-red colour to an herbaceous border is purple smokebush. There are a few cultivars but the most common is Cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Purple’. The trick is to cut it back to the ground, i.e. ‘coppice’ it, in spring. Here is ‘Royal Purple just emerging with tulips.

Here is coppiced ‘Royal Purple’ a little later in the season with a lovely matching brushmark lily (possibly ‘Latvia’) in Bev Koppel’s wonderful garden at the Deep Cove Chalet Restaurant outside Victoria, B.C.

Here is coppiced Cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Purple’ with tropical Tibouchina urvilleana at the Conservatory Garden in New York’s Central Park.

And in Toronto horticulturist Frank Kershaw’s garden, there is an entire symphony of wine colour around Cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Purple’, including shutters, window awning and dwarf Japanese barberry.

Given all the hybridizing that’s occurred with heucheras over the past few decades, there are numerous selections with luscious leaves of burgundy and reddish-purple. At the Horticulture Centre of the Pacific outside Victoria, B.C., I adored this beautiful spring combination featuring Heuchera ‘Amethyst Mist’, Allium aflatunense ‘Purple Sensation’ and the dark-leafed ninebark Physocarpus ‘Diablo’ at rear.

Heuchera micrantha ‘Rachel’ is quite lovely.

And Heuchera ‘Pinot Noir’ has a name that fits our theme very nicely. It’s shown below frolicking with blue-flowered Gilia capitata.

One stunning peony is dark enough to be called ‘wine’, even if its actual name describes another favourite indulgence. Here is Paeonia ‘Chocolate Soldier’.

Though true-red irises have eluded hybridizers, there are many that come close to our November colour. Below is the heritage bearded iris ‘Col. Candelot’. Other deep-reds to check out are ‘Red at Night’, ‘Galactic Warrior’, ‘War Chief’, ‘Raptor Red’ and ‘Nebraska Big Red’, to name just a few.

And what about this gorgeous thing? Meet Iris spuria ‘Cinnabar Red’.

Though the mourning widow geranium (Geranum phaeum) is a little on the purplish side, I’ve included it here anyway. (And it’s a great bee flower!)

The breeders of the sweet William (Dianthus barbatus) below decided on a memorable name for their dark-flowered beauty. Meet ‘Heart Attack’, hanging out here with airy Allium schubertii at Wave Hill in the Bronx.

Early summer gives us masterworts (Astrantia major), and though many seem to be wishy-washy in their colouration, that’s not the case with ‘Hadspen Blood’, below, from Nori and Sandra Pope’s once glorious garden.

I simply adore Knautia macedonica with its dark-red button flowers that flower from spring well into autumn. It is the zingiest zing you can have in a border (or meadow), and all the bees love it, too.

Daylilies (Hemerocallis) aren’t really my thing anymore, other than the dear old orange tawny lily (H. fulva) that I have given up trying to annihilate in my garden. That being said, there are lots of wine-colored selections to choose from, including the lovelies below.

Clockwise from upper left: Strutter’s Ball, Round Midnight, Regal Finale, Tuscawilla Blackout, Black Ice, Jungle Beauty, Starman’s Quest, Jennifer Napier

Admittedly, Mexican hat (Ratibida columnifera) isn’t very showy, but it’s a fine choice for well-drained soil and a naturalistic garden.

Martagon lilies (Lilium martagon) are the epitome of elegance and will take light shade. Below is the fabulous ‘Sarcee’, named for a First Nation tribe in hybridizer Fred Tarlton’s province of Alberta. I photographed it in his astonishing collection at the Devonian Gardens near Edmonton.

It is made to last for a longer time. you can try this out prescription du canada viagra They have found the viagra active PDE5 body enzyme becomes unable to cause impotency in man’s body. Purchase Your Medication without Prescription A number of online pharmacies which provide you viagra sale no prescription at your doorstep. In case you are experiencing sexual dysfunction designed a diminished libido, cialis generic cipla and 69-74 had trouble achieving orgasm. One of the magical, airy plants in Dutch designer Piet Oudolf’s palette is the dark form of Japanese burnet (Sanguisorba tenuifolia ‘Purpurea’) at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

For tough, low-maintenance perennials with wine-red leaves, you simply can’t beat sedums. Below is my array of some notable selections. The bees will thank you!

We don’t always stop to observe the subtle colour changes that happen as flowers age beyond their prime. I loved this dreamy crimson-wine duo of Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum ssp. maculatum) and fountain grass (Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Cassian’).

Japanese barberry (love it or hate it) occupies a special place in the world of wine foliage, and its response to trimming makes it especially appealing in formal gardens. Without a red barberry, how could you possibly achieve the beautiful creation below, in the Knot Garden at Filoli Garden near San Francisco? Along with the Berberis thunbergii ‘Crimson Pygmy’, we have dwarf lavender cotton (Santolina chamaecyparis ‘Nana’), germander (Teucrium chamaedrys) and dwarf myrtle (Myrtus communis ssp. tarentina ‘Compacta’).

Though not particularly showy, the pineapple-scented, deep-red flowers of Carolina allspice (Calycanthus floridus), below, are intriguing – and they fit my category!

What about trees with dark-red leaves? One that is deservedly popular – and much smaller than its parent, almost a tall shrub – is weeping copper beech (Fagus sylvatica ‘Purpurea’), below.

And I cannot go on without mentioning ‘Forest Pansy’ redbud (Cercis canadensis) – especially when it looks like this from underneath the canopy!

Now for some warm-weather wines: tender bulbs, tropicals and annuals.

A few of the pineapple lilies (Eucomis) are an interesting combination of olive and burgundy, like E. comosa ‘Oakhurst’, below. Look at that dark-red stem. (‘Sparkling Burgundy’ is another with similar colouration.)

Although they can look parkimental (park+regimental) grown in rows or Victorian-style bedding, many cannas have beautifully marked leaves and, in the right spot, add a luscious touch. Here is ‘African Sunset’ canna lily (Canna australis).

Speaking of the ‘right spot’, in Bev Koffel’s garden, a reddish canna and the deep-burgundy succulent Aeonium arborescens ‘Zwartkop’ add rich notes to an elegant urn.

Do you grow dahlias? If you like dark and dramatic, look no further than ‘Black Knight’.

Perhaps no species offers more possibilities in the wine spectrum than the foliage plant coleus (Plectranthus scutellarioides, formerly Solenostemon, formerly Coleus blumei). I was enchanted by the way the gardeners at Toronto’s Spadina House worked ‘Wizard Mix’ coleus into their late summer plantings.

Want to see a few more? Here is ‘Kong Red’…

… and ‘Dipt-in-Wine’…..

… and ‘Big Red Judy’.

Though it’s not hardy in my part of the world, Pennisetum setaceum ‘Fireworks’ is a fabulous, variegated, dark-red grass to add movement and colour to the summer garden.

I’m a frequent visitor to the Montreal Botanical Garden, and I loved seeing these burgundy-leaved tropicals against a yellow and gold three-panelled screen there a few years ago. From left rear are red spike (Amaranthus cruentus), rubber tree plant (Ficus elastica ‘Burgundy’), calico plant (Alternanthera dentata ‘Purple Knight’) and ‘Carmencita’ castor bean (Ricinus communis).

Here’s a look at the flowers of ‘Carmencita Bright Red’ castor bean (Ricinus communis). (Caveat emptor. Do be aware that this plant’s seeds contain one of the deadliest toxins known to man, ricin. Just a few salt-sized grains of purified ricin can kill an adult.)

When we visited Nancy Goodwin’s Montrose Garden in Hillsborough, NC, a few years ago, spectacular and unexpected colour combinations were everywhere. I did enjoy this red-leaf hibiscus (Hibiscus acetosella) with orange dahlias.

In my own garden, I experiment each year with the contents of the six containers on the lower landing of my sundeck. One summer, below, I tried ‘Sweet Caroline Red’ sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) with Anagallis ‘Wildcat Orange’. (The truth is it looked better in June than it did in August, since the anagallis petered out and the chartreuse-leaf pelargoniums were underwhelming, but the sweet potato vine thrived.)

Speaking of pelargoniums, ‘Vancouver Centennial’ is a real winner, with its bronze-red foliage.

One of the best spiky ‘centrepiece’ annuals is Cordyline australis ‘Red Star’, seen here in a pot at the Toronto Botanical Garden. Just look how its deep tones are picked up in those colour splotches on the luscious ‘Indian Dunes’ pelargonium.

And hello ‘grains-as-ornamentals’! This was redspike (Amaranthus cruentus) with slender vervain (Verbena rigida) and ‘Lemon Gem’ marigolds (Tagetes tenuifolia) in a fabulous planting one year at Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Garden.

Speaking of edibles, you can’t get find a more beautiful, wine-leafed edible than this beet: Beta vulgaris ‘Bull’s Blood’ with nasturtiums and chartreuse ‘Margarita’ sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas).

And my last sip for our November wine tasting is a fine, full-bodied claret – yes, ‘Claret’ sunflower (Helianthus annuus).

Whew! ‘Wine-ding’ down now, that takes me through eleven months in my 2016 paintbox. Stay tuned for December and some lovely silver ‘belles’.

Orange: Three Fruits & a Fish – Part One

Posted on October 23, 2016 by Janet

Well, it’s now October and I resolved back on January 1^st to devote my Paintbox blog this month to the colour orange. Or, as I’ve called it in my title, ‘three fruits and a fish’, which pokes a little fun at the way the English language learned to describe colours, long before Isaac Newton first focused a prism on sunlight and conjured up the ‘visible light’ spectral rainbow in his college room.

“Three fruits and a fish” is not a balanced diet, but a plateful of related colour: orange, peach, apricot and salmon. (And in the interest of trivia, did you know that the fruit orange is classified as a hesperidium or modified berry? I thought not! Peaches and apricots, of course, are drupes or simple stone fruits. You’re welcome.) We all know what a navel orange or sockeye salmon flesh looks like, but what distinguishes peaches and apricots? Well, Wiki defines apricot as a “pale, yellowish-orange color” (or, as I say, halfway from orange to gold), and peach as a “light moderate to strong yellowish-pink to light orange colour” (my emphasis on the pink here, but without sufficient blue pigment to tip it completely into that candyfloss hue).

And what colour is salmon? Wiki says it’s “a range of pale pinkish-orange to light pink colors, named after the color of salmon flesh.” I would disagree with the “pale” part, unless you’re talking about spring salmon J. (Then again, Wiki has this painful, hair-splitting dissertation further down the page: “The color light-salmon is displayed at right. This is a color that resembles the color salmon, but is lighter, not to be confused with dark salmon, which resembles salmon pink but is darker than salmon pink and much darker than light salmon.” Confused yet?) I think of salmon as being a rich colour, as shown in the tropical plants Acalypha wilkesiana and Abutilon, below, in a container at the Toronto Botanical Garden…

Placing my colour arrays together, below you can see more clearly the difference in (clockwise from top left): orange, salmon, peach and apricot.

Orange Array: Tulipa ‘Ballerina’; Florist’s ranunculus (Ranunculus asiaticus); ‘Red Chief’ California poppies (Eschscholzia californica); Iceland poppy (Papaver nudicaule); ‘Tokajer’ blanket flower(Gaillardia x grandiflora); quince (Chaenomeles x superba); Potentilla ‘William Rollson’; butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa); ‘Bonfire’ begonia (Begonia boliviensis); Dahlia ‘Pooh’; Helenium autumnale ‘Rubinzwerg’; Canna ‘Phaison’
Salmon Array: Tulipa ‘Mariette’; ‘Bowles Red’ lungwort (Pulmonaria); ‘Spicy Lights’ azalea (Rhododendron); ‘Venus’ opium poppy (Papaver somniferum); ‘Pardon Me’ daylily (Hemerocallis); ‘Coral Reef’ beebalm (Monarda didyma); Calibrachoa ‘Superbells Coralberry Punch’; Rosa ‘Carefree Celebration‘; Echinacea ‘Secret Lust’; Diascia ‘Darla Apricot’; Zinnia elegans ‘Benary’s Giant Salmon Rose‘; Dahlia ‘Bodacious’
Peach Array: Tulipa ‘Angelique’; Hyacinth ‘Gipsy Queen’; Itoh Peony ‘Kopper Kettle’ (Paeonia); Oriental poppy ‘Victoria Louise’ (Papaver orientale); Heuchera ‘Marmalade’; Dutch honeysuckle (Lonicera periclyneum ‘Serotina’); Rosa ‘Marilyn Monroe’; Lilium ‘Visa Versa’; ‘Comanche’ waterlily (Nymphaea); Chrysanthemum ‘Sheffield Pink’ (Dendranthema ); daylily ‘Designer Jeans’ (Hemerocallis); Alstroemeria
Apricot Array: Narcissus ‘Fidelity’; Tulipa ‘Cairo’; Pansy ‘Imperial Antique Shades Apricot’; Iris ‘Sunny Dawn’: Heuchera ‘Caramel’; Calibrachoa ‘Superbells Peach’; Rose ‘Honey Perfume’; Nasturtium ‘Whirlybird Series‘ (Tropaeolum majus); Dahlia ‘Sunshine’; Gerbera; Sedum rubrotinctum ‘Aurora’; African daisy (Osteospermum ‘Symphony Series Orange‘)

Looking at the artist’s colour wheel, below, which is essentially a rainbow curved into a circle to illustrate in a visual way the relationships between spectral colours, we see 6 hues marked with a letter. The three marked “P” are defined as primary colours: red, yellow, blue. By combining equal parts of those primary colours with their neighbouring primary colour, we come up with the secondary colours shown and labelled “s”. It is more complicated than that (and of course there are tertiary colours and darker shades and lighter tints) but the point I’m making is that if our gardens were paintings, the visually pleasing ‘complementary contrast’ to the secondary colour orange is the primary colour blue. Keeping in mind that that artist’s colour wheel is just one of several ways of ‘organizing’ colour (the primary colours of light are an entirely different subject), on my power point slide below, orange wallflowers (Erysimum) are perfectly paired with deep blue forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica).

And that’s not to say that orange ‘Beauty of Apeldoorn’ tulips, below, wouldn’t look as lovely with yellow or dark pink flowers as neighbours, but the relationship of the colours blue and orange is inherently a pleasing one to our eyes. And from long observation, I’d add that orange flowers also look good paired with violet, purple and lavender blossoms as well.

Because I love the colour orange and have spent a lot of time observing this colour in gardens and nature, I’ve collected photos of myriad plants with orange flowers (and colour companions for those), as well as plants with orange berries and orange fall leaf colour. (Read my blog on orange autumn leaves here.) I’ve even assigned orange-coloured plants to their growth type and seasons, below.

Spring Bulbs

So let’s explore orange in the garden beginning with some of my favourite spring blossoms, then hardy summer bulbs and perennials. In my next colour blog, I’ll talk about orange-flowered and orange-leafed roses, shrubs, tropicals and annuals. And let’s begin – as the flowering year does – with crocuses. Who doesn’t love a good apricot-orange crocus, like C. x luteus ‘Golden Yellow’? Honey bees do, I can assure you.

I’m a sucker for perfumed hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis) – I buy a few dozen every couple of years, and love them even better when their form relaxes in years 2 and 3. (But don’t count on them hanging around forever.) If I were planting hyacinths with little blue bulbs like striped squill (Puschkinia scilloides), I’d definitely choose peach-orange ‘Gipsy Queen’, below.

Then there are daffodils. Have you grown any split-corona or butterfly types? One of the most spectacular is also one of the most pronounced “orange” daffs. Meet ‘Orangery’.

Since I’m a gardener who enjoys naturalistic, meadow-style gardening, I can’t say I’ve ever been a great fan of the big crown imperial fritillaries – a bit too stiff for me. But you must admit that Fritillaria imperialis ‘Rubra Maxima’ would make a splash, especially in a formal garden.

Orange tulips like lovely ‘Beauty of Apeldoorn’ pictured above are fairly common, and personally, I love planting them with pink tulips, because winter is just too long and cold not to celebrate with a riot of warm colour in spring. Here are some of my other orange favourites: 1 – Orange Emperor, 2 – Daydream, 3 – Irene Parrot, 4 – El Niño, 5 – General deWet, and 6 – Ballerina.

The lily-flowered tulip ‘Ballerina’ deserves special mention. It really is a wonderful dancer.

And I cannot leave tulips without paying tribute to one of the peacocks of the spring bulb world: the parrot tulip. This is ‘Salmon Parrot’. It won’t last long – it’s definitely not a ‘perennializer’ – but if you’re this stunning, you don’t need to hang around forever.

Hardy Bulbs

Hardy lilies (Lilium) in shades of orange are a dime-a-dozen too, and I’ve gathered a few combinations featuring purplish perennials. There’s old fashioned speckled tiger-lily (Lilium lancifolium), here consorting fetchingly with ‘Fascination’ Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum).

And one of my newest favourites, Lilium henryi, shown here with hoary skullcap (Scutellaria incana) in the Piet Oudolf-designed Seasonal Border at the New York Botanical Garden.

Should you desire some knock ‘em dead perfume in the summer garden, you can always plant a few ‘African Queen’ trumpet lilies. Mmmm…..

But for the world’s most delicate, elegant lilies, you need a martagon or two, especially in conditions of light shade. On the left, below, is ‘Sing Out’, on the right ‘Burnt Orange’.

Where it’s hardy (Zone 6), Crocosmia ‘Emily McKenzie’, a corm that is planted in early spring, is a wonderful deep-orange hit for the garden. And like all crocosmias, it’s a hummingbird favourite. I loved the double-header below at Vancouver’s Van Dusen Gardens with ‘Emily McKenzie’ in the foreground and an orange Helenium autumnale (perhaps ‘Rubinzwerg’) in the rear, sandwiching a white echinacea.

Stately foxtail lilies (Eremurus), though considered a ‘fleshy root’ rather than a bulb, are nonetheless often sold in autumn along with bulbs. They can be orange, white, yellow and peach and add a gorgeous vertical note to early summer plantings (plus bees adore them). I thought this joyous planting of Eremurus ‘Cleopatra’ with corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) in a mixed meadow planting of annuals and perennials at Chanticleer Gardens in Wayne, PA was one of the prettiest combinations I’ve seen.

Here it is again, showing the entire Rock Ledge Garden at Chanticleer. That’s dark purple Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’ at the bottom.

Perennials

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While on one of my late spring visits to Vancouver’s Van Dusen Gardens, I was wowed by this mass waterside planting of Euphorbia griffithi ‘Fireglow’.

And there are beautiful orange primulas for damp places in spring. Look for Primula bulleyana, below….

… and the rich orange form of cowslip (Primula veris).

The best peonies can do in the orange department is coral, which is just a teensy bit redder than salmon. But there are some beauties, including the four below, clockwise from upper left: ‘Constance Spry’, ‘Coral Sunset’, ‘Coral Supreme’ and ‘Lorelei’.

There are some luscious peaches in the Itoh Peony group (hybrids between tree peony and herbaceous peony), including ‘Kopper Kettle’, below, with Salvia nemorosa ‘May Night’.

The genus Papaver boasts many orange-flowered species, but none are more flamboyant than old-fashioned Oriental poppy. This is Papaver orientale ‘Prince of Orange’.

And you will always find bees and hoverflies on wonderful little Moroccan poppy (Papaver atlanticum ‘Flore-Pleno), which is surprisingly hardy (USDA Zone 5) and easy to grow in all soils.

Bearded irises are the prima donnas of the early summer garden, and you can find them in the most wonderful shades of peach, bronze and clear orange, like the tall bearded ‘Orange Impact’, below.

I was intrigued to find beautiful copper iris (Iris fulva) growing on New York’s High Line. Honey bees had found it too, but its natural pollinators in the Mississippi Valley are hummingbirds. This orange-flowered member of the Louisiana Iris group likes damp (even wet), slightly acidic soil and is supposedly hardy to USDA Zone 5.

Verbascums can be found in apricot-orange (‘Helen Johnson’ among others), but this delicate June pairing in pale peach caught my eye at Toronto’s Casa Loma: Verbascum ‘Southern Charm’ and Sicilian honey lily (Allium siculum, formerly Nectaroscordum).

One genus that’s seen a lot of hybridizing in recent decades is red-hot poker or torch lily (Kniphofia). Since they grow naturally in hues of orange or yellow, there is an abundance of choice here. I loved this fun mingling of Allium ‘Lucille Ball’ and Kniphofia ‘Flamenco’ at Chanticleer, in Wayne, PA.

And don’t forget about heucheras; they’re a treasure trove of peach and bronze-orange foliage possibilities. Here’s Heuchera ‘Caramel’ with dwarf Kniphofia ‘Mango Popsicle’.

Daylilies, of course, offer a motherlode of orange choices, not just in orange, shown in a few samples below (Clockwise from top left: Hemerocallis fulva ‘Kwanso’, Kansas, Challenger, Lady Lucille, Rosalind, Furnaces of Babylon)….

…. but there are loads of peach (left) and apricot (right) cultivars, below, too. And note that in the daylily world, “lavender” is often (peachy) wishful thinking. (Top, left to right: Uptown Girl, Strawberry Candy, Chicago Peach, Second Glance; Middle: Empress Josephine, Designer Jeans, Scatterbrain, Ellen Christine; Bottom: Lavender Illusion, Lavender Patina, Brookwood Double Precious, Fan Dancer).

Daylilies are so prolific and varied in colour, they can be forgiven their need for constant deadheading and propensity to browning foliage in late summer, etc. So they’re best paired with other plants, like this duo at the New York Botanical Garden: Hemerocallis ‘Poinsettia’ with balloon flower (Platycodon grandiflorum).

The vast daylily collection at Montreal Botanical Garden offers lots of brilliant ideas for partnering, including this bronze-orange ‘Chelsey’ helenium (Helenium autumnale) with lovely Hemerocallis ‘Cherokee Pass’.

One of the best perennials for dry gardens is hybrid blanket flower (Gaillardia x grandiflora). Provided you keep it deadheaded, it will flower from early summer well into autumn, and the bees will thank you. Though most are bicoloured red-yellow or red, I have grown a beautiful orange one: G. x grandiflora ‘Tokajer’. It lasted for three years or so, and I missed it terribly when it didn’t come back one spring, possibly after a winter without sufficient snow cover.

I’ve written before about my favourite orange-flowered perennial, butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa), which is simply unparalleled for attracting pollinators (including the monarch butterfly, which uses it as a larval food).

And it’s fun if you want to create a little heat, colour-wise, as I’ve done below, pairing it at my cottage with bright-red ‘Firebird’ echinacea.

Speaking of heat, orange flowers are often the backbone of hot-coloured schemes in the garden, whether paired with reds and golds, as with Echinacea ‘Tangerine Dream’ and ‘Secret Glow’, below….

… or with hot-pinks, below. On the left is butterfly milkweed with the pink ‘Orienpet’ lily ‘Robina’, on the right is the double daylily Hemerocallis ‘Kwanso’, with a bright pink summer phlox.

That’s a good first look at hardy orange bulbs and perennials. Next time, we’ll explore orange-flowered shrubs, annuals and tropicals, and a few design touches to add a little orange punch to your garden.

June Purple at Spadina House

Posted on June 9, 2016 by Janet

There’s no better place to celebrate ‘purple’ – my featured colour for the month of June – than the lush, lupine-spangled, late-spring gardens in the ornamental potager behind Toronto’s historic Spadina House.

Now a city-owned museum, Spadina House was built in 1866 by Toronto’s James Austin (founder of Dominion Bank, later merged to become Toronto-Dominion Bank, then TD Bank). The property, at the time a 200-acre concession, had been settled originally in 1818 by Dr. William Baldwin, an Irish-born lawyer, doctor, schoolmaster and eventual two-term assemblyman in the town of York (later called Toronto) on land inherited by his wife Phoebe Willcocks and her sister Maria, from their father Joseph. Sitting at the crest of the hill that leads from midtown to downtown – in historical geologic terms, it’s the escarpment overlooking the sloping shoreline of Lake Ontario’s ice-age predecessor, Lake Iroquois – Dr. Baldwin mentioned the name for his new rural home in a letter to his family in Ireland. “I have a very commodious house in the country. I have called the place Spadina – the Indian word for Hill or Mont.” Baldwin’s name came from his hearing of the Ojibway word ishapadenah, which meant “hill” or “rise of land” (and its correct pronunciation for the house is Spa-DEE-na, not Spa-DYE-na). Using a width of two chains (132 feet), Dr. Baldwin also laid out Spadina Avenue itself from Queen Street north to Davenport, at the bottom of his hill. In 1837, Lieutenant-Governor Bond Head ordered the extension of the road further south, almost to the lake.

What is Purple?

Before we head to the back garden at Spadina House, let’s look for a moment at colour. Purple is not a spectral hue, like short-wavelength indigo and violet – the “I” and “V” in our old mnemonic ROYGBIV for the red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet of the visible spectrum we see in a rainbow.

Rather “purple” is a word that people today use to describe various combinations of red and blue; it’s also sometimes used to describe colours that are really indigo or violet. It’s a muddy minefield of a colour word, its use open to broad interpretation and its misuse widespread (especially in plant catalogue descriptions!) But purple has an actual history, its etymological origins in the Greek word πορφύρα (porphura), the name given to an ancient pigment from the inky glandular secretions of a few species of spiny murex sea snails that have been harvested from the eastern Mediterranean, perhaps as early as 1500 B.C. In her fascinating book Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Victoria Finlay recounts how she visited the Lebanese city of Tyre, stayed in the Murex Hotel, and sneaked past guards to get to the ancient dye baths that gave rise to the colour Tyrian purple. When she finally found samples of cloth dyed with the colour in the National Museum in Beirut, Finlay was surprised and delighted. “Because it wasn’t purple at all: it was a lovely shade of fuchsia.” More like the hue Pliny wrote about in the first century A.D. “Next came the Tyrian dye, which could not be purchased for a thousand denarii a pound”, and “most appreciated when it is the color of clotted blood, dark by reflected and brilliant by transmitted light.” A colour, perhaps, like this web version of Tyrian purple, below, which looks like Finlay’s deep fuchsia-pink.

The august figure in the centre of my Tyrian purple sample is the Byzantine Emperor Justinian 1 (482-565). Note the “clotted blood” colour of his garments. Justinian was responsible for building the magnificent Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 537, and there is a purple connection to that ancient structure. When I visited it a few years ago, I was struck by the crimson-red pillars; they are made of the mineral porphyry, a word which also traces its roots to the Greek word for purple.

If you were of high enough rank in the Byzantine Empire to warrant Tyrian purple robes, you were considered “born in the purple” and your honorific name very possibly reflected that fact, as with young Porphyrogenetos, below, (Latin, Porphyrogenitus, Greek Πορφυρογέννητο), son of the emperor.

But much earlier – 500 years earlier – Roman emperors had worn Tyrian purple, including the most famous of all, Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.). In fact, unless you had the power and wealth to wear Tyrian purple robes, you were prohibited from wearing the colour, and could be executed for daring to do so. When Caesar visited Cleopatra in 49 B.C., her sofa coverlets were recorded as having been “long steeped in Tyrian dye”. And in the painting below by French artist Lionel Royer, “Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar” (1898), we see Caesar adorned in Tyrian purple robes.

Over the eons, I think it’s clear that we’ve come to view “purple” as less reddish (as in clotted blood) and more blue, a kind of deep, rich violet. So let’s head to the flowery back garden at Spadina House and see if we can visually puzzle out some other “purplish” hues.

Back to Spadina House

In the large ornamental potager behind Toronto’s historic Spadina House, the “cottage garden look” is very much in evidence. Within a formal structure of four even quadrants and intersecting cinder paths are rows of vegetables, strawberries and herbs surrounded by a billowing perimeter of herbaceous perennials, including plants like Virginia bluebell, lupine, peony, iris, anthemis, Shasta daisy, veronica, tradescantia, catmint, Japanese anemones and asters, among many others. Old-fashioned annuals grown in cold frames beside Spadina’s greenhouse are planted in the borders each spring. Behind a hedge to the north is an orchard of heritage fruit trees, and south of the house are lawns with old shade trees overlooking downtown Toronto and Spadina Road. And next door is famous (but much younger) Casa Loma.

But in early June, it’s all about lupines, irises, sweet rocket, baptisia and peonies, and there’s a decidedly PURPLE tinge to the garden.

Leaving aside Tyrian purple from ancient history, to my eye this is what purple should look like.

To see a contemporary emblem incorporating the colour purple, look no further than a U.S. military Purple Heart.

At Spadina House, purple is at its best in the deepest-colored flowers of the gorgeous Russell hybrid lupines. Purple lupines grow with lilac-purple chives (Allium schoeneprasum) ….

…and with mauve and white sweet rocket or dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis) and luscious violet-purple bearded irises….

Sometimes those purple lupine flowers have Tyrian purple markings (or what we might nowadays call fuchsia-pink) and attract the attention of bumble bees who are strong enough to force open the petals.

Some of Spadina’s beautiful Siberian irises (Iris sibirica) are also purple.

Now I’m going to move on to another ‘purplish’ colour, one that takes its name from the visible spectrum, but also gives its name to a large class of flowers, i.e. violets. In this case, I’ve added a little VIOLET poster girl to the colour swatch, our own native common blue violet Viola sororia. Notice that qualifier “blue”….. ?

Though colour terminology in flowers is very arbitrary, “violet” is also seen as purple by many, but it does have more blue than my purple swatch above. It is seen in many of Spadina’s lovely old bearded irises. Note the difference in hue from the lupines.

Bearded irises come in a rainbow of colours, but the duo below is the classic complementary contrast of yellow-violet from the artist’s colour wheel.

Valerian (Valeriana officinalis), below, is a pretty June companion for violet-purple bearded iris.

Columbines (Aquilegia vulgaris) are charming June bloomers and their colour can be violet-purple, as well as pink, white, yellow, red and much more.

Here with see violet columbines with a single orange poppy (Papaver rupifragum).

And here is columbine consorting nicely with yellow flag iris (Iris pseudacorus) in front of Spadina’s greenhouse.

There is an intense colour of violet with much more blue (yet still not completely in the blue camp) that can be described as BLUE-VIOLET, below.

At Spadina House, some of the Siberian irises have much more blue pigment in their petals and can be described as blue-violet.

Another purplish colour that borrows its name from the world of flora is LAVENDER. Although there are a number of plants we can call ‘lavender’, the one I think of as having flowers of this colour is English lavender, Lavandula angustifolia. That is the plant I’ve put in my lavender-purple swatch below. Less intense, more blue, but a sort of greyed blue.

At Spadina House, I do see English lavender in June, looking quite lovely with the miniature pink rose ‘The Fairy’.

And it’s also in the flowers of the herbaceous clematis, C. integrifolia, seen here with sweet rocket.

Blue false indigo (Baptisia australis) is a wonderful native northeast perennial, and though it doesn’t sit perfectly in my lavender-purple camp, being a little more intensely blue, it is quite close. And certainly not a true blue.

Here it is with the classic white peony ‘Festiva Maxima’. Isn’t this beautiful?

Now we move to yet another variation on blued purple that takes its name from flowers. I’m talking about LILAC. In my view, this one should look as much as possible like the flowers of common lilac (Syringa vulgaris), so that’s what you’ll find in my lilac colour swatch, below. In art terms, this one might be described as a tint, i.e. paler in intensity.

At Spadina, some of the columbines are soft lilac.

And some of the bearded irises, too, like the luscious heritage iris ‘Mme. Cherault’.

The next variation on purple moves further into the red family. Meet MAUVE, below. This color has its etymological roots in the French language, for the French word for the European wildflower common mallow (M. sylvestris) is la mauve. However, its language roots aren’t buried in ancient Greece, but in east end London in Victorian times. For it was here, in 1856, that Royal College of Chemistry student William Henry Perkin, while using coal tar in a quest to discover a synthetic alternative to malaria-curing quinine, came up with a solution with “a strangely beautiful color”. At first, according to Victoria Finley in her book, he called it Tyrian purple, but changed the name to a French flower (la mauve) “to attract buyers of high fashion”. It was a great hit. “By 1858 every lady in London, Paris and New York who could afford it was wearing ‘mauve’, and Perkin, who had opened a dye factory with his father and brother, was set to be a rich man before he reached his twenty-first birthday.”

Mauve’s affinity to red means that people will often say “mauve-pink”, rather than mauve-purple, but there are good reasons for including it in my discussion of purples, if only to differentiate it visually from the more blue hues. At Spadina House, we see mauve in many of the sweet rocket flowers (Hesperis matronalis).

It’s quite clear, when I contrast sweet rocket with some of the irises, that our lexicon for colour proves to be difficult and often ambiguous. Colour vision is a relationship, not an absolute, that depends on our own eyes and of course colour rendition in the medium for viewing, if not in ‘real life’, i.e. a phone or computer screen. What I see is a mauve sweet rocket flower beside a bearded iris with light violet standards and true purple splotches on the falls. But this is a tough one!

Finally, here is mauve sweet rocket with more of Spadina’s beautiful lupines. And what colour do you think those lupines are? I will leave that one with you to ponder.

Later in the month, I promise another look at purple — this time without quite so much colour terminology. Happy June!

Janet Davis Explores Colour

In the garden & the world

Tag Archives: perennials

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