Every Flower Sends a Message to those who take it in.
Hello from my Santa Barbara garden. Lately, I’ve been on break from writing about cooking. As you may know, I’m heavily distracted with my garden-related activities and so, I thought I’d veer over to my current passion on this my original page. Awhile back I claimed the domains for a new page called Garden-Inspirational but I never got around to finishing it. Life’s been way too busy. Instead, since Kitchen-Inspirational is tag-lined Celebrating Kitchen, Garden, Travel, I’m going to focus on the garden for awhile. So, please consider the page now temporarily shared with “Garden-Inspirational”.
To begin, I ask myself, what do you experience when you look at a single flower blossom? A particular color of flower? Do you know what instinctively appeals to you and what does not? Do you just like it or just not like it? Or, does your sensibility and curiosity require you to need to know more, to know why? Do you know why you garden in certain colors and not in others? I think about these questions fairly often and I think the topic is worth a gaggle or two or three………
Those of us who garden do so for a huge variety of reasons. There’s everything from the simple joy of it to the so-called exercise (not mine). Whatever calls you out the door in the early morning, at high noon or at dusk when mosquitos and gnats (or bats) are about is really just you at the end of what used to be the phone “line”, i.e, something’s “calling” you out the door.
Single Hibiscus
I am not a color theorist nor am I a psychologist. But, I know what I like, I know what I naturally gravitate towards and what is naturally “disagreeable” to me. I have pretty firm opinions and preferences. And, I think I know what I feel when I “see red”. But, how and why? Have I been conditioned to pass it by via my earlier predilections or do I still not care for red?
Color selection and placement is such a personal characteristic of your garden and is a unique and unless you hired someone to plant a garden for you and told them to do what they wanted without input from you, is a personal reflection of you. Ostensibly, we select for effect from both close in and farther out. We also garden for feeling – options on a spectrum from being restful and restorative all the way to bold, exciting, even shocking, maybe in cools to hot color options. (We also garden for climate and conditions.) Being mostly an up close admirer of the magic of flowers, I have sensibility conversations with myself on this on an ongoing basis. It really takes a professional to plan for overall effect and I am certainly far from that. And, I tend toward the overall informal English garden approach to bedding and enjoying plants. Unless you’re actually starting from scratch or have the opportunity to completely re-do your garden, a chore which I imagine indulging in regularly – blue tarpaulin, spade and dirty knees de rigeur, the practical approach is mostly of the band-aid, additions and subtractions with really unknown, and sort of random results – kind of like when you try on clothes, year after year.
stunning single rose – this one came closer than any – probably Altissimo
For consideration, I note that I have many garden-related hobbies. One is I am one prone to watching others wandering around the garden center and selecting plants. This is a curious preoccupation not unrelated to watching people grocery shop. I must confess that I see many people who will stand there for quite long moments in serious consideration, pondering with the exactness of a surgeon. Others seem overwhelmed with the selection and nervous, handling many plants and seeming skittish. Many are actually clueless about what to pick as they perhaps haven’t yet made the definitive connection to either their personal gardening statement or their whim and sense of serendipity. To me, this is not a terrible chore. It’s supposed to be fun – unless someone’s paying you to execute their specific vision.
One particular thing that is fascinating to me is to watch the people who select plants that I would never select – either because I have failed to see their beauty or function in their intended place (how could I) or that their shape and coloring (allure) is odd to me. I have to stop and ponder what exactly they may be thinking that appeals to them – remembering always that a plant’s beauty is always in the eye of the beholder – and possibly one of education, mostly mine.
Which brings me more closely around to the actual subject of this blog post.
zinnia Anyone who knows me well has heard me go on about the color red – and by and large, not in a positive manner. Fans of fire engine red begonias or salvia will most likely be offended here. I’m not a fan. I don’t even like red roses. They are my least favorite color and the only one that is in my garden in New Jersey is David Austin’s Mustead Wood – if you want to call that red. The color red, in its purest iterations, for me is too harsh and it just rubs me the wrong way – speaks to me in negative tones and if you are a sensitive gardener as I am you hear these messages loudly and respond to them in kind. Overall, I am mostly a soft color gardener and hence am definitely more of a pink girl and am drawn to mostly cool colors when gardening.
However, I have surprised myself over the last year or so as I have found myself actually looking at (as contrasted with marching past indignantly) some deep red, like Burgundy geraniums, hereby proving to myself quite astonishingly that as totally determined as I am to fight with something, I can even prove myself wrong and evolve and at least consider change in my old age. And, I actually bought some red, white and grape color phlox recently here in California, mostly because it was coming up to July 4.
ivy geraniumAnyway, color in the garden is indeed a very personal thing. Yes, that is what I was supposedly talking about. A few years ago as I connected with my gardening in a much deeper level even though I have had a garden nearly every single year of my life I began to think much more about this. My Dad, from whom the seed of my gardening passion was derived, liked red flowers. This remains, 32 years after his passing, completely confounding to me.
My garden is a place for solace and serenity – red isn’t serene for me. Cheerful, happy and pleasing are my notes and so red gets passed by.
The word instinctively is very key here. For me, this is what I “look for” when flower shopping. What am I naturally drawn to? This is the key to a personal garden. While it isn’t limited just to color, texture, shape, fragrance and blooming frequency are also elements to consider, color is perhaps the overriding element of garden selection.
phloxAll this leads to yesterday’s activity. In the morning, I challenged myself to an experiment. I took a trip to the garden center and went around to a view a wide array of red flowers. I wanted to press myself to take in their message – after all, every flower sends a message to the person who looks at it. I wanted to test my predetermined response to red to see if I was cheating myself out of other options. I spent a considerable amount of time and saw some pretty amazing samples. However, after almost an hour, when I went to the register to pay, there were only some verbena bonariensis, light lavender scabiosa and balloon flower on the cart – all tones of purple. At the next stop, I tried again and wound up with deep purple petunias and a planter filled with light pink, white, light moss green and silver. No red. I don’t know if you’d say the experiment was a failure or a confirmation. I didn’t want any red flowers.
not even these:
To choose your flowers is really like a curating experiment. I love this chore, if you will, and the act of doing so is as much a pleasure as is choosing the spot, bedding them in and then enjoying each day’s appraisal of how it’s going. So, my humble advice is to listen to your own personal color conversation – the one that occurs naturally in your sensibility center as you see flowers in the landscape, in the garden center, on the seed rack, in books, columns and others’ garden offerings. It takes patience and connection to “get” the reaction to your palette. And, don’t confuse shape, texture or scent with your response to color.
Here is my primer, a sample of my current flowers from cool to warm – what’s going on right now:
and, white:
While blue is always the most astonishing color in the garden, the pickings are rather slim. And so, pink has always been and probably will be my primary target. The range is wide and the allure is anchoring. It is comforting and pleasing where those hot reds are not. Softest pinks to warm and then toward hot, as hot as it gets in my garden anyway.
I do have to say that at this time of year I tend to get restless, even bored with my garden. Partly this is because the joy of the anticipation of what’s to come is waning. Also, I get kind of sick of looking at the same things – except for roses and poppies nowadays. I find myself a bit cranky with it all – somehow yearning for something new to study. In New Jersey, as the Japanese beetles tire me out in July along with the awful heat and humidity, the dahlia season is just coming along and I may even begin to get a little wistful as August approaches. The great array of phlox will be coming out along with Japanese anemones, sedums and autumn clematis.
All in all, I’m learning a lot from gardening on two coasts. Will keep you “posted”.
p.s. all opinions and suppositions are mine and mine alone 🙂