Bookish Gardener

Perception colored

Dog days already. The peonies went from lush to louche in less than a fortnight. These days, all I need for my impression of Albert Brooks in Broadcast News is to step outside and stand stockstill.

Just before the sun sets, the duskglow of the garden takes on a sepia-toned cast from the sodden, humid air, like a historical flashback in an artsy movie, or a fugue state. Pinks, yellows, reds, grays and blues buzz through the haze like old neon light fixtures.

The other night, my husband was out in a stretch of the back border sequenced in jewel-toned 'Caradonna' salvia, yellow coreopsis, purple-bronze sedum, red-to-yellow blanketflower, magenta petunia, lemon yellow 'Happy Returns' daylily, pale blue catmint, this meadow buttercup, sunshine orange calendula, and blue-purple 'May Night' salvia. He was stopped at one spot, looking at the buttercup, and then the salvia, and then back and forth again. Look, he said. See how the blue looks after you stare at the yellow. He was right. In daylight, 'May Night' is pretty much a plain blue salvia, without the pizzazz of 'Caradonna' or the subtlety of 'Blue Hill', but it turned electric in that light with our little gaze-shifting exercise.

Which all brings to mind this from Gertrude Jekyll, the first and last word on color in the garden:

Each portion now becomes a picture in itself, and every one is of such a colouring that it best prepares the eye, in accordance with natural law, for what is to follow. Standing for a few moments before the end-most region of grey and blue, and saturating the eye to its utmost capacity with these colours, it passes with extraordinary avidity to the succeeding yellows. These intermingle in a pleasant harmony with the reds and scarlets, blood-reds and clarets, and then lead again to yellows. Now the eye has again become saturated, this time with the rich colouring, and has therefore, by the law of complementary colour, acquired a strong appetite for the greys and purples. These therefore assume an appearance of brilliancy that they would not have had without the preparation provided by their recently received complementary colour.

Gertrude Jekyll, The Gardener's Essential Gertrude Jekyll (selected and with an introduction by Elizabeth Lawrence). David R. Godine, 2000. ISBN 0-87923-599-3.

Newly blooming: Ratibida columnaris (Mexican hat), Alcea rosea (pastel hollyhocks), David Austin rose 'Bibi Maizoon', Monarda didyma 'Jacob Kline', Hemerocallis 'Happy Returns' (daylily), Clarkia unguiculata (mountain garland), Linum grandiflorum (red flax, self-sown), Zinnia tenuifolia 'Red Spider' (self-sown), Nicotiana langsdorfii (green flowering tobacco, self-sown), Phlox paniculata (pink and 'Bright Eyes'), Asclepias tuberosa (white butterfly milkweed), Cichorium intybus (chicory), Aconitum (white monkshood), Heliopsis helanthiodes (false sunflower), Echinacea purpurea (white coneflower), Prunella grandiflora (selfheal).

Color my world

A few days ago I got startled and suckered into a supermarket checkout-stand impulse purchase. I had to have this magazine. Its glossy cover radiated color: bright blue flower planters, stuffed with pink pelargoniums, purple petunias, egg-yolk yellow marigolds, and rose-red dragon wing begonias, set against the soft-focus shimmer of chartreuse and gold in the background. (Yeah, it was the cover, but it might as well have been a centerfold.) It's as though I'd forgotten what color was, in these latter days of gray, with crusted snow banks like the insides of an overfrosted old freezer, and evergreens faded to khaki. Even dreams these days are dun-colored (and sometimes fretful and ridiculous: last night's featured an extremely large rabbit hoisting an extremely tiny rabbit up to one of the whiskey barrel planters, the better for it to gobble away at the tops while simultaneously digging out the plants by their roots). When I can't claw my way out of this total failure of imagination—how could it ever be warm again? and green again?—I turn to these memories of summer past, stowed away for this chilly day, from Hands in the Dirt, and try to start dreaming again in "green bean green".

Changeling

A lovely lagniappe: one of my "blue" columbines (Aquilegia caerulea) is blooming in an unexpected color this spring. The photo doesn't adequately depict the subtlety of the parchment coloring of the petals, with faint streaks of purplish-blue and green. I don't have any other columbines in my garden, so there's no logical explanation for this baby-that-looks-like-the-milkman. (Indeed, another bud from this same plant is blooming in the expected purple-blue.) It's a welcome—and needed—surprise; this smallish front bed has been mostly given over to my "any color, so long as it's blue" tendencies ('Bertram Anderson' lungwort—blue; comfrey—blue; corydalis flexuosa—blue), and this turns out to be just the thing to give the bed some rest and balance. (Now, what'll I do if it doesn't come back in this color next year?)

Euonymus Fall Color

Last week's hard freeze has been followed by several days of Indian summer, and the deciduous trees have "bloomed" into fall colors seemingly overnight. Around our neighborhood, the most-of-the-year-drab burning bushes (Euonymus alata) are finally redeeming themselves. How to describe the color? A strong pink, just shy of a red, not tipping over into magenta, infused with a matte, almost chalky coral undertone. (Yeah, yeah...a picture's worth a thousand words.) All I know is that it would be a fabulous color for lipstick or nail polish. Of course, nothing gets on the cosmetics shelves these days without a just-so name. Take, for example, these specimens from my moldering collection of MAC lipsticks, courtesy of a girls'-day-out shopping spree a few years ago: "Diva". "Rebel". "X-S". "Underworld". And my personal favorite, "Smoove". (The color doesn't do much for me, but the name put me in stitches.)

By these standards, "Euonymus" probably doesn't cut it. How about..."Hue Ominous"?

(Sorry.)