Color your garden: express yourself with flower and foliage blends

Sunset, April, 2004 by Sharon Cohoon

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Choose a multicolored flower or leaf as your starting point. Then pick up one of those colors in a second plant. Play up the brown center of a purple coneflower by planting a bronze New Zealand flax beside it, for instance, or enhance the golden throat of a red daylily with yellow roses. Then just keep going. Depending on your jumping-off point, you could end up with a bold garden or a mellow one; you just got there a different way.

Tips for color repetition

* Pick a focal point. Start with a visually dominant plant of an appropriate height and scale for center stage in your flower bed.

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* Find the echo. Identify an accent color in the flower of your starter plant; it could be the eye, throat, striping, or even a subtle undertone, Now choose a second flower that echoes this color.

* Pair leaves and flowers. Foliage can also be your starting point; variegated foliage is especially inspiring. You could, for instance, start with a bronze flax with apricot margins and pair it with an apricot daylily. Then echo the gold eye of the daylily with, say, coreopsis.

* Buffer with green. Separate contrasting color compositions with sweeps of neutral green foliage. The general rule in flower beds is two-thirds greenery, one third flowers.

* Be patient. Composing color echoes is trickier than monochromes or duets, but it can also be the most fun.

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Pink companions. Deep pink Rosa nutkana picks up the lavender-pink lupine behind.

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Peachy pairing. 'Gypsy Dancer' rose echoes the rosy peach trumpets of Phygelius 'Trewidden Pink'.

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Chartreuse connection. Lime-flowered Nicotiana langsdorffii highlights the chartreuse-edged leaves of a deep burgundy coleus.