Colour: dense vs diffuse

Most plants present their floral colour in a way that is irritatingly, or at least disappointingly, diffuse.  This is never more obvious than when you take a photo of a plant or combination of plants you’re pretty pleased with, only to find that the consequent pic is 98.5% green and only 1.5% flower.

Then very, very occasionally the opposite is true – that the colour is so densely presented that you don’t know how to integrate it in any sensible or even enjoyable way in the garden.

An example par excellence is provided by Ceanothus ‘Blue Pacific’.  Its spring flowering produces a solid block of electric blue.  The colour is unarguably sensational, but the sheet of unvarying, indigestible colour stands out crazily from its surroundings, and makes a nonsense of pretty much anything else flowering in the vicinity. The only way I can think of really validating it in a whole-garden setting is to use it repeatedly, echoing around the garden, so that it’s deafening chromatic scream can come at me equally from several directions.  Annoyingly I don’t have any pics to illustrate this, but you can see the plant in question here.

The kurume azaleas are a bit the same.  The colour is so outrageously solid that they don’t make any sense in the overall picture unless they’re toned down by something growing up and over them, perhaps, or something growing in front of them, like the single white peony at Wisley (image above).  That way the solid colour just becomes a background for something else, rather than the main – blinding – point itself.

I’m having the same problem with the potted petunias I’ve been going on about in the last few posts.  They were getting a bit leggy in early January, so I cut them back to stumps before going camping.  About three weeks later, the consequent regrowth, which is all at a consistent height, has produced such a solid cushion of colour that I’m tempted to move them away from any of the more modest things in their presence, in an act of floral face-saving.

Having played with colour for years, I know that I like it best when it varies in its density, so often try to use solid-colour plants with others nearby that are capable of diffusing the solidity into the surrounding green.

I’ve always had trouble taking pics that illustrate the point perfectly, but this, taken at Toronto Botanic Gardens doesn’t do a bad job.  The exact same colour is presented in solid blocks by the aster, and rather more sparsely by the geranium.  Using them together allows the colour to intensify and recede, or gather and spread in a way that neither of the plants alone could do.

I was really chuffed when, about Christmas time, a stand of Golden Aurelian liliums bloomed really properly in a very new, incomplete part of my garden.  This they did with no supplementary water, and in a fierce, west facing position in a spot that no one in their right mind would normally have put liliums.  But I’d been told they were exceptionally tough, and so they proved to be, producing huge heads of large golden flowers.  The trouble was that they were the only thing really in bloom at the time and looked, to be quite frank, ridiculous.  They needed to be swallowed up on other stuff – stuff that presented similar or complementary colour in a softer way.

I started to think about what I’d plant them with, and haven’t yet found the perfect combo. I wondered about using Ammi majus (Queen Anne’s Lace), which would provide a nice froth of white to complement the solidity of yellow, but young plants established a month or so before the lilium flowered struggled with the dry.  I considered a tallish blue/purple Salvia like Indigo Spires, but soon faced the fact that there’s no way I could get it up to the necessary height by December in my frost-ridden location.  I wonder if Thalictrum flavum ‘Glaucum’, with its strikingly glaucus divided foliage and fuzzy yellow flowers would flower at the same time?