How to Put the Colors of the Rainbow in our Garden

Mixing and matching too many plants can create sensory overload or chaos, which we want to avoid in our home garden. We want our garden to have drama and focal points, not a collection of high points that compete against each other. Like a piece of symphony music, it should have a first movement or sonata, a build-up, and a crescendo, the musical piece lively but not too rushed, dramatic but not clashing, or extremely loud. We use colors of blooms and of leaves to create a desirable “symphony” in our garden.

"Roses are red"...yet red has different tones and shades, and gardeners need to be mindful of these variations of red

We also try to have colors convey some emotions and meaning. Like colors of the flowers in a bouquet that can mean something to lovers, or the receiver or the giver, the colors of blooms hold meaning and elicit emotions. The same goes for us -- or any other gardener -- and the garden viewers. Colors are gardening's communication devices.

We are aware though that people have different emotions and ways of viewing colors, often based on their personal experience with those colors and their preference toward certain colors. Yellow, for example, might be too bright and too much in-your-face for some people, while the same yellow is preferred by others for its ability to lift spirits up like bright sunshine.

The above color wheel and the mood each color might represent have been replicated here from the website of Studley's, a garden and landscaping company. Great visuals, to highlight how colors evoke certain emotions.

In general, we think RED oozes with deep feelings like love and devotion, it's fierce and fiery. YELLOW brings upbeat feelings for yellow is vivacious and bright and sunshiny. PINK and LAVENDER show sweet delicate emotions. Warm colors like red and burgundy give feelings of warmth and being in love while whites and creams give a sense of delicateness

and purity. Oranges and fuchsia explode in joyful and youthful abandon.

The store label of this beebalm says RED, yet different people see this so-called red as purply red or bright red or dark red.

We use different color palettes in various parts of our garden to catch viewers’ attention and to somehow convey our varying moods and “emotions.”

But we understand no single color works by itself but rather in relation with other colors near or around it. The color wheel (remember that color wheel in our art class way back in our elementary and high school days?) helps us decide how to mix and match colors in our garden.

In the color wheel, the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) are found forming a triangle as far away as possible from each other. Then we have the secondary colors of green (yellow and blue mixed equally), orange (red + yellow), and purple (red + blue), again creating their own triangle formation or triad.

Seldom, however, do we find the primary colors in flowers. Flowers often have tint (lighter color of the primary or the secondary colors as white is added) and shades (darker color of the primary and secondary colors as black is added). And there’s tone (mixing with grey) and "neutral" colors (black, white, and grey, and in gardening, also green) that reduce the chroma,

or colorfulness, while the hue (unadulterated red, blue or yellow) remains unchanged.

Confusing? If you can master colors in your garden, you've become a Master Gardener, a horticultural artiste! Hats off to you, definitely.

We use controlled color contrast to create drama by using primary colors, or secondary colors opposite each other in the color wheel. They are called COMPLEMENTARY COLORS. We find such an association of contrasting colors easily creates the most striking, quickly noticed, and very desirable color combination in our garden.

Harmonious secondary/tertiary colors at play (golden orange daisies and coneflower with purple clematis and lavender blooms of hosta Francee Williams, capped by the rosy red throats of climbing campsis radicans and creamy yellow honeysuckle)

HARMONIOUS COLORS are those adjacent to one another in the color wheel, like red, red-orange, and orange; or blue, purple, and violet. We find harmonious colors easier on the eyes than complementary colors. So we prefer using harmonious colors over complementary colors in most parts of our garden.

We play with complementary colors when we need a segment of our garden to pop and to pop out right away. We limit the use of complementary colors to the garden along the busy street where drivers don’t have time to really “inspect” but merely quickly glance at the garden as they drive by. These complementary colors tend to call out to the viewers: “Hey, quick, look this way!”

We employ harmonious colors in our garden by the walkways, the driveway, and close to the house. These sections of our home garden are designed mainly for us and our visitors who have more time to truly look at the garden, inspect the planting scheme, and appreciate how we employ colors to create a more personal, intimate garden.

In our garden, we love placing burgundy in various places -- burgundy is our favorite color. Hey, our van is burgundy, the details in our house are in burgundy, our downspout is even painted burgundy -- well, you get the idea...

Burgundy is our family's favorite color, so many burgundy-leaved Japanese maple trees (ground-hugging prostrate variety, weeping dwarf variety, medium-height trees) are mainstays in our garden. Burgundy shows off the golden flowers of lysimachia and the the golden yellow blades of the Japanese hakonechloa grass in this plant grouping.

Burgundy flowers, unfortunately, are limited. Aside from burgundy dahlias, gaillardas, petunias, heliotrope, and cosmos, the picking is very restrictive. So we rely on burgundy-leaved plants, notably the Japanese maple trees and smoke trees (Cotinus coggyria). We have used the purple-leaved Japanese maple as focal points in our garden: a weeping variety commands the axis point of our street-side garden; more weeping Japanese maples reside at the ends of our front walkway borders acting like exclamation points if our walkway borders of clipped boxwood were a sentence; we have the taller variety occupying the understory of our neighbor’s giant pine trees; a medium-height burgundy maple tree grows beside my wife’s fig tree.

Chartreuse is another favorite color that we use extensively in our garden. Chartreuse is a versatile mix of yellow and green. Chartreuse is not as overly bright as yellow and not as “neutral” and banal as green. Wherever we place chartreuse in the garden, that color manages to lift up the level of drama in that section of the garden without looking garish that yellow might create. Chartreuse goes well with “loud” colors like fuchsia and bright orange, my daughter’s favorite colors. And since my daughter seems to be the most artistic in the family, we oftentimes follow her lead. I must say I favor the more subtle color combinations of the secondary and tertiary colors away from the bright pinks and bright orange. My wife prefers pastels. Thus, our garden has separate sections that cater to our color choices, and that makes every gardener in our household happy.

Of course, we don’t get to look at our garden all the time, so we note down when we usually will have a view of our garden: the time of the day, even including the time of the night, since colors assume varying “looks” based on how the sun shines on the colors.

For example, during a good part of the day when the sun is shining brightly, our burgundy Japanese maple trees appear to look like smoldering bushes as their glossy yet lacy burgundy leaves bounce off the sunlight. But at night these burgundy Japanese maples that are our star plants during the day blend in with the night's darkness and become “empty” spots. I guess like horticultural black holes.

So we try to pair the golden Japanese hakonechloa grass with the Japanese maple trees. The Japanese hakonechloa grasses cascading beside the weeping dwarf maple trees take over the stellar role as the sun goes down. At night, these grasses look like golden fountains shooting outward from the “empty spot.” Kind of shooting stars from the black holes. We immensely enjoy viewing this horticultural “fountain” or shooting stars from our bedroom window at night. Yes, this section of our garden looks attractive in daytime, but it shines at night.

During the day, the cascading golden Japanese hakonechloa grass and the burgundy weeping dwarf Japanese maple look good, but it's at night time that I view this grouping from our bedroom window with much joy and satisfaction. The golden grass glows at night like a shooting water fountain from the night-darkened maple tree.Light, or lack thereof, adds extra dimension to colors in our garden.

We spend many evenings on our back deck, so we plant numerous white-flowered and silvery-leaved plants around the deck. Rosal and jasmine (with their fragrant pure-white flowers) and white caladiums, white-edged hostas and white Japanese anemones are the star plants here.

Even the invasive bishop's weed or goutweed (Aegopodium podagraria ‘Variegatum’) has a place in our deck-side garden simply because its white-variegated leaves look good at night.

Even the bishop's weed plant figures prominently in the side section of our deck garden. Yes, it's a weed since it spreads fast and invades any real estate it is allowed to conquer). We plant this "weed" around a garden fountain and placed river rock and sand around it to control its vicious spread.

White and silver “shimmer” like low-wattage spotlights as the sun goes down. We plant these white-flowered and silver-leaved plants in strong geometric patterns so that when the sun has totally hidden behind the nearby mountain, we see shimmering geometric patterns around the deck, especially so when the electric lights in the deck are turned off and we let lit candles provide the romantic glow. The view from our deck becomes magically relaxing and dreamlike.

We don’t underestimate the importance of the shapes and textures of leaves. Like with the colors of flowers and the foliage, we try to exploit the shapes and textures of leaves to great advantage. Flowers can bloom only for days or at most a few weeks, but the leaves of the plants can be seen whole year round in the Philippines and about half of the year in places with four seasons. Thus, leaves as much as, if not more than, the flowers are in the viewers’ sight and consciousness.

The various colors, shapes, and textures of the leaves still make this part of our garden look good, even without flowers.

Once we manage to design our garden using colors, we beam with satisfaction and pride every time we view our garden. With our favorite color, we create drama and interest in our garden by using that color over and over in various spots in our garden. That favorite color never fails to draw our eyes through our landscape and gives our garden a cohesive feel and creates joyful emotion. If we feel good about it, chances are the viewers of our garden will like it, too. We like to share our joy and horticultural symphony with others. And colors have it for us and our garden viewers.