2010 leaves... for the last day of the year

As 2010 leaves us, we hope you'll enjoy this little slideshow of some of the memorable leaves from the year behind. It doesn't always have to be about the flowers... although a few did sneak in here and there.

We hope that 2010 leaves you with fond memories, and that 2011 brings you health, happiness and the best of your best wishes. Happy New Year from those Battersby girls at Toronto Gardens.

Garden colour: Cooling down the reds, Part 2

Naughty Berberis 'Rose Glow' in its brazen autumn garb, with a leaf in just the right place

While there's no denying its scarlet beauty in fall, purple Berberis thunbergii or Japanese barberry is a shrub I can't in conscience recommend due to the tendency of barberries to install themselves, uninvited, in wild spaces. Darn it.

However, this post is about colour, not conscience. And the issue I want to draw your attention to is the issue of neutrality… or how to use neutral colours in the garden to tone down heat such as red.

What is a neutral? It's an unsaturated colour with a lower value or intensity. In the garden, grey often comes to mind. The examples I focus on here are cream or tan – a soft yellow or dull green.

Note how the creamy yellow in the sugar maple leaf attracts your eye and gives it a rest amidst the all-out red and purple foliage. It offers a small island of calm. That's one of the benefits of a neutral.

In this outstanding Orienpet hybrid lily, see how the neutral cream border both accents and alleviates the intensity of the dark red petal centres? While a deep yellow trim would still have made a beautiful lily, the effect wouldn't be as coolly elegant as this.

Lilium 'Sheherazade'

Here's another instance where a neutral makes a strong colour less brash. It's one of the newer, exciting coleus(eseses), Solenostemon 'Henna'. Henna's red isn't strictly red, it's a red-purple. But the centre of each leaf is a bronzy-yellow-green I'm calling tan. (In deeper shade, the centres are much greener.)

Tan or bronze is an interesting new foliage colour that is now appearing in plants such as the sedge Carex 'Bronze' or Heucherella 'Sweet Tea.' With 'Henna', the neutral tan brings out the attractive serrations and the texture of the leaf. Although the tan covers quite a bit of the upper leaf surface, it still allows the red-purple to shine. In fact, I think it makes it richer.

Solenostemon 'Henna' is great in containers

Hot colours advance, cool colours recede, and I find that neutrals occupy a happy middle ground, adding something to the overall texture of the garden.

You might have noticed that the proportion of neutral to intense colour grows in each of these images. The last shot is an inverse of the first, with a blush of red in a plane of straw-toned grasses and tulips. This spring bed at the Toronto Botanical Garden graduated in colour, from pale buffs at one end to intense reds at the other. It was a dramatic picture, and it gained at least some of its power from the subtle quiet in the neutrals.

Tulips in the Garden Hall Courtyard of the Toronto Botanical Garden

It would be worth waiting to trim your grasses back in spring to get this effect. I love the linear texture of the grass repeated in the red striations on the tulip petals, don't you?

For more ideas on neutrals such as grey and black, check out this Canadian Gardening article by Judith Adam. And here's the link to Part 1 of our Toronto Gardens article on Cooling down the reds.

Garden colour: Cooling down the reds, Part 1

Papaver orientalis 'Beauty of Livermere' is an astonishingly red red*.

Our grey-day colour series continues with red. A craving for red seems to be programmed into our red-blooded DNA, especially at this time of year. And this red is pure Santa-suit, Rudolph's-nose, holly-berry red – the red that seems even redder when paired with its complement green.

So, given the almost-winter chill, why talk about cooling red down? And what does this unabashed blast of colour have to do with cooling, for Pete's sake? Hang in and see.

When gardeners put red with other colours, they usually go for intensity. Intense contrasts such as red and white, or red and and its triad blue... or red, white and blue! In analogous palettes (analogous colours are the ones closest together on the colour wheel), red is often thought of as going with colours on the hot side. Think of a tropical red, orange and yellow garden, for instance.

But this analogous pairing, red and purple, is another thing. It's a Red Hat Society combination, the one the poem tells us "doesn't go." I happen to love it. One of the reasons is that the blue pigment in the purple moves the palette towards the cooler side of the colour wheel. It cools down the red.

Red in the Echinacea disks echoes the red Monarda flowers

The colours in the picture above are analogous, too. But the mauve-pink in the Echinacea petals have been dialed back by the addition of white. Mauve is a tint or tone of purple, created by adding white or grey, respectively. The white in both also cuts the heat, while the red in its intense pure form as well as in the mauve gives this analogous colour key a pleasing sense of unity.

Red Japanese maple, very likely Acer palmatum 'Bloodgood', with a pink polyantha rose that looks like it could be Rosa 'The Fairy'

Okay, scale back the intensity. The pink in this sweetheart rose doesn't contain a hint of blue, but the white tint is cooling. I find this monochromatic red-pink pairing to be refreshing; warm but without a furnace blast; a gentle contrast. Of course, the complementary green leaves contribute strongly to the picture.

If you're interested in experimenting over the dark months, you might like to visit colour palette generator sites like COLOURlovers or Color Scheme Designer. While some of the colours on these sites aren't ones you'd find in nature, they let you play around, unleash your wild side (with no repercussions) and simply get a sense of what works, what you like and what you don't.

Go ahead. Light a fire under your imagination... even if you don't care for the colour red.

Our series on Cooling down the reds continues here.

(*If the picture at the top looks familiar, it's because this cultivar of poppy is on my Lust List.)

I call it mellow yellow, quite rightly

She's a perfect poster girl for my post on yellow: the much-maligned Hemerocallis 'Stella de Oro' (not, as is often written, 'Stella d'Oro'). This photo shows how effective she can be "when well used."

The day is grey. Grey, grey and more grey. Plus, it's December. Naturally, this inspires me to begin a series about colour in the garden.

What could be more apropos than to begin with yellow, the colour of that missing sunshine? When people, by whom I mean gardeners, declare they don't like yellow, it always surprises me. Don't like yellow? Yellow? What's not to like? Like poor old Stella de Oro daylilies, the plant that gardeners love to hate, it seems to me that the colour gets all the blame for the sins of the gardener.

We need a serious dose of sunshine, so I'm here to sing the praises of yellow. Think of it in all its variations, from the palest buff of fall grasses to the trumpet blasts of daffodils, from the bordering-on-greens to the tinged-with-reds. Yellow can be an accent or a complement. The blues of blue, f'rinstance, look just that much bluier when paired with yellow. It's a simple law of physics.

So let's have no more of that I hate yellow stuff, gardeners. First, hate is an emotion that doesn't belong in the garden. Second, it's shockingly limiting to cut yourself off from the full colour palette that nature provides us. Don't hate; be brave enough to embrace your inner yellow.

Now, enjoy the pictures, and please come back to think colourful thoughts.

What could be cheerier than that blast of yellow Forsythia in the bereft, early days of the year? Thanks, Mr. Forsyth (the 18th-century royal gardener, and co-founder of the RHS, whose name this shrub bears). Available in a variety of yellows, there's sure to be a forsythia that appeals to one's delicate sensibilities – even if just in someone else's garden.

Some people object to the shade that my sister Sarah calls "eggy yellow." Yet the sunnyside-up colours of Tulipa tarda are so welcome in the spring garden. This is a low-growing species tulip that is fairly reliable about making repeat appearances year after year – unlike some of its puffed-up cultivar cousins.

Who an remember a) walking through Southern Ontario woodlands in spring and b) actually seeing wild dog's-tooth violets (Erythronium) blooming at the foot of sugar maples, cupped by red-spotted leaves? This sweet woodland native comes with other names equally enchanting: trout lily and adder's tongue. Its lovely pale yellow goes with everything. (Get it, or any native, from a reputable supplier, not from the forest!)

Laburnum or golden chain tree can be a dramatic sight in late May or early June. This showy member of the immense legume family is a distant cousin of peas and beans. But please don't eat it – all parts of the laburnum are poisonous.

Hosta 'June' is one of the loveliest of the bazillion hosta cultivars. Its frosted leaves with striations of creamy yellow, green and blue make a bold accent in themselves, but also a great complement to other colours in the garden. To quote Sir William Lucas speaking to Mr Darcy: Who could object to such a partner?

Ginkgo, ginkgo, ginkgo. No, I'm not doing a bad Cary Grant impression, I'm reminding myself how to spell the word. It's gink-go, not, as it is usually pronounced, ging-ko. By the way, the fall leaves are fabulous. Yes, that's the technical term.

Yellow isn't usually cited as an effective fall colour. It's hard to believe when you see this. The katsura tree (Cercidipyllum japonicum) can not only give you smack-on-the-upside-of-the-head yellow fall foliage – it can, if you're lucky, smell like candyfloss.