Gardening Sweet Spots
By Donna Hessel
Let’s take a few artists’ iconic paintings and plant “artistic” containers using their color schemes. Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” painting is a good example of a contrasting color scheme — blue and yellow.
A container reflecting Van Gogh’s color scheme would include flowering plants in yellows and blues with maybe a dash of orange. Unless you have space to plant perennials at the end of the season, annuals would be the better choice for your containers. Keep in mind the thriller-filler-spiller design recommendation to keep your containers well balanced when selecting plants. Green foliage plants work as a neutral and in some collections, white will make the bright colors pop. Also consider the color of the container to intentionally contrast or blend it with the colors of your plants.
Yellow flowers are some of the easiest to find and many blue annuals come in taller varieties. Visualize a shiny blue planter with yellow “spillers.” Good spiller choices would be yellow nasturtiums, yellow calibrachoa or another trailing yellow petunia, Thunbergia (yellow-orange black-eye-susan, which can either trail or vine) or a chartreuse sweet potato vine. For a mounding filler consider blue lobelia, marigolds of a darker shade than your yellow spiller, or perhaps “Cathedral”™ blue salvia that grows in a mound about 24” tall. For your tall thriller, choose a darker blue leaning-toward-purple flower or a tall yellow-leaning-to-orange plant. Some choices might be Angelonia (flower spikes up to 8 inches in both blue and purple), or a taller, dark blue salvia. An upright, taller choice might be a yellow flowering Canna, taller coreopsis or a bright yellow dahlia. Depending on the size of your container, you may need more than one of each of these plants. Or, you can add a neutral green-leafed filler such as a frilly fern. Other high contrast color combinations you might want to try are red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange.
I took on Picasso’s “Guernica” – essentially a monochromatic mural in neutral colors – as a challenge.
Could a container in neutral colors be interesting? In researching plants for a monochromatic planting that would emulate Picasso’s painting I found a number of plants that would work. I would plant them in a black, mid-size container or a gray or black urn. Some of the plants to be considered might be Primo® Black Pearl coral bells, sweet Caroline Raven™ sweet potato vine, silver dusty miller (filler), velvety silver lamb’s ears (the non-flowering cultivar “Silver Carpet”), black Mondo grass (filler) and white Diamond Frost euphorbia. Finding a thriller – the tall plant to anchor all these shorter mounded and trailing plants – could be challenging. A bunch of curly willow twigs or other slim, interestingly shaped tree branches could be your tall focal point. The currently popular birch tree logs would also work. Finding the “right” place for this container would be important. I think it would be most attractive set against a cream-colored or white sided wall or in a garden plot surrounded by tall grasses or evergreen shrubs.
A selection of calibrachoa and trailing petunias in shades of one color would make a more vibrant monochromatic container. Select a container of the same color – in a lighter tint or darker shade – as the color of the flowers you plant in it. Place it against a background of complementary colored plants to make it pop.
Here’s an easy one! Take Piet Mondrian’s red, white and blue abstract painting and translate it to a (patriotic!) container masterpiece. Try trailing blue lobelia or verbena, red geraniums, red petunias, red salvia or snapdragons, white Angelonia or white petunias in a white pot. Or if you want to go all-out Mondrian, find a shiny yellow pot. I’d add trailing green or variegated ivy in this pot to give the eye a place to rest. Tall red ornamental grass (actually purple fountain grass), a tall red Canna or spiky red Cordyline would make be a perfect thriller.
These are examples of analogous color schemes: violet, red-violet and red; red, red-orange, orange; yellow, yellow green, green; and blue, blue-violet, violet. We can use Picasso’s painting “She Knows” as an example for our container with an analogous color scheme. He actually used two sets of analogous colors in this painting.
A large terra cotta color pot would work well for this arrangement. Choose plants with flowers in tints or shades of red, orange, red-orange and blue, blue-violet and violet (purple) to reflect Picasso’s painting. Start with a deep purple heliotrope and surround it with red and peach snapdragons or red and peach salvia. Choose nasturtiums with red and red-orange flowers for trailers, along with pink verbena. It sounds like these would clash, but they will contrast beautifully with the purples. Coral bells (Heuchera) Primo® ‘Wild Rose’ with dark purple color leaves, and ‘Sweet Caroline’ red sweet potato vine would also look great in this container, as would a bright pink petunia. Consider red or pink begonias or the fuchsia with red/purple combo flowers. Tall, light pink Angelonia would be a nice thriller. Add Persian Shield for an excellent filler and Tradescantia (Wandering Jew) as a trailer — both with reddish-purple and green varigated leaves and no flowers.
If you’re at a loss as to what to plant in your containers this summer, or just want to experiment with something different, select a painting by your favorite artist and reproduce its color scheme in flowers. Entering the name of a plant or just a general description (such as “tall purple annuals”) in a search engine will provide you with a multitude of plant choices. After you have created your masterpiece container, frame a small picture of the painting that inspired you and post it on a stick in the container. It will definitely be a conversation starter when your friends visit!
“Starry Night” image courtesy vangoghstudio.com
“Guernica” image courtesy flickr.com
Mondrian image courtesy commons.wikimedia.org
“She Knows” image courtesy pinterest.com
