Blue Garden
Part of making Pine Cottage a more appealing place to live involved the garden. In the spring of 2004, I embarked on an extensive project to create a pond and surrounding garden for the cottage. Since I was new to landscaping and landscaping design, I decided to break up the garden into "sections" that I would then design with a specific dominant color in mind. I can say that, almost 4 years later, this was one of the better decisions I made.
So, the front area to the left of the house entrance became the "blue" garden. I remember imagining the barren plot as bursting with blues of hydrangeas and other plants, a glorious array of color and texture. It’s a good thing I can work on delayed gratification, because it took 3 years to achieve just the look I had in mind, and countless plant adjustments and discoveries, some of which I want to capture here. However, I consider this area of the garden one of my better achievements. You can see in the photo album below a chronology of this section of my garden, with some description of the changes I made and why. Click the arrow to view the slide show, or click on the photo to go directly to the album to view in larger size. (If viewing the album, be sure to click the "slide show" link for the full effect.)
The rest of this post is about the lessons I’ve learned in the process of working on the "blue" garden.
A dominant color theme keeps away the "hodge-podge" effect.
When you are eager to put plants into your empty ground, it’s so easy to be drawn to a variety of plants. They look their very best in the nursery and you just want to start loading them into your cart, with no regard for design compatibility (and habitat requirements). By choosing a single color as your "theme," you limit your selection to either that color, or to plants that complement it. Be sure to keep the balance of color in favor of the primary choice. This left me free to wander the nursery when shopping for this section of the garden. Pick up a plant and ask: "Blue, or goes with blue?" If yes, consider for purchase, if no, pass it up. In this case, I found that when I had maxed out on blue plants, pale yellow and white worked well.
Pale yellow and white go with every other color.
This was something I discovered on my own throughout the entire garden, and something I read from Christopher Lloyd in one of his articles. They also light the garden up during the morning and dusk times of day, providing a kind of magical re-focusing on your plants.
Not all "blues" are "blue."
It turns out that, in garden nomenclature, the description "blue" has a wide variance. For example, to my eye some salvias described as "blue" are actually purple. The "Blue Columbine" (aguilegia) is purple. I opted for definitively blue plants and think that this was a good choice for keeping away the hodge-podge effect, since purple has enough red in it to detract from the overall "cool" tone I was attempting to achieve in this section.
Pay attention to sunlight requirements.
This space used to hold a lavender rose, but the garden did not get enough sunlight to support it. However, the white rose did just fine, and I have learned that, in general, white roses seem far more tolerant of part sun than any other color. I don’t really know why this is, but it’s something I’ve found to be true in other part-sun areas. The rose in this garden is Queen Mary 2, an easy-care and prolific rose almost always free of rust and black spot. Salvias definitely prefer more sunlight, yet I could shift them to better spots in the garden and achieve a decent effect. However, my irises are not so tolerant. The ones that are shaded by other plants don’t do as well, so this past fall, I repositioned them to better spots. We’ll see if that helps.
Pay attention to final plant size.
It seems obvious now to me that planting blue fescue in front of pansies is…DUMB. When the label reads: 2-3′ tall, why did I put it in the front of my garden? Oops. If all plants in your area are taller than 2′, then fescue makes a lovely border plant, but not in front of pansies. I now use a bamboo stick broken off to the general height of the mature plant and stuck it in the garden to "represent" my final plant so I can better determine height and placement and avoid later having to move the plant.
Repetition creates movement and connection.
Repetition can be created either with color or with plant shape. I first started a foray into lime green/yellow with my bamboo grass and found that with the addition of a yellow huechera and sedum, the repetition of color drew the eye in a line across the garden and to the front of the house, where it connected with the other lime green/yellow plants on that side. So, you can use repetition of color or strong texture to "connect" otherwise disconnected sections of a garden. You can see in the later picture a hint of the yellow heuchera, yellow pansies, the yellow sedum and the bamboo. In addition, there is a strong repetition of hydrangeas, so even though the colors vary from plant to plant, the texture and shape that repeates creates a unity. So too with the sword-like shape of the iris leaves which are picked up by the shape of the bamboo.
Contrast is necessary too!
Initially, I was "all blue or nothing," but not only was this limiting, it was boring. Somewhat ironically, contrast also acts as a reinforcing element for the main color, and thus creates unity. Without contrast, you have no unity to your garden. If you have only a garden full of blue plants, your brain will just "meld" the look together and it will kind of look like a big blob. By adding contrasting color, you wake up your brain, and then your pattern-matching head will bounce around, looking for another "contrast" to match with the first one. The contrasting elements create a frame around the space and help your eye pay attention to all of the garden elements.
Create a space for annuals.
I found that not much was going on in my garden in the very early spring (out here that is February/March), so when I saw blue pansies abounding in both the late fall and early spring, they seemed a natural choice. Initially, I planted them behind the blue fescue (don’t ask what I was thinking there) and I just found it easier to use a designated spot for these plants, where I could easily replace them as needed, as well as mix them up with other interesting low growing plants, as my mood dictated. For any future garden design I do, I will plan a section that can host annuals so I can always add a new splash of color at any point in time. If you keep this section small, it’ll still look ok if it’s not filled up for a short period of time, since other plants typically drape past their borders. (This fact seems to greatly annoy my husband.)
3-season interest is good.
Once I put in the pansies, I decided to plant some grape hyacinths and daffodils, so that by March, I could have a glory of spring color, and you can see by my photo of March 25 of 2007, I got just that effect. Also, the hydrangeas turn an interesting deep red color in the fall, and the white spring blooms of the Viburnum plant give way to deep orange foliage in the fall. My last photo shows some of this effect in October.
Use ornaments to enforce your design theme.
Here, I kept my ornaments to blue or white. You can see the white trellis looks nice because it not only shows up against the dark background, but also repeats the white accent from the rose on the left and picks up on the white rocks in front. Otherwise, everything else is blue… blue pots, blue gazing ball, blue bird feeder and house. The list sounds like overload as I write it down, but if you look at the photos, the single color use helps create a unity that diminishes the, you guessed it.. hodgepodge effect!