Summer Color:
annuals brighten things up

Some of my favorite combinations, especially for containers, are what I term “grandma garden” colors: deep true purple, bright yellow, bright red, and pure orange. The trick to making this look good is to keep the colors in the high saturation range. Don’t water it down with pastels or blues and off-purples.

Of course, a huge overflow of one plant variety in a single color is a gorgeous presence, too! Hopefully this jolts your imagination into creating your own garden masterpiece. Annuals are ideal for experimentation, check out the annual plant list page for individual variety choices.

I’ve always liked a tighter color scheme, with a limited palette, for an entry way. It is welcoming without being distracting. Also, it can provide a nice background to showcase the container plants, flower boxes, or hanging plants that often accentuate a front porch.

My favorite color scheme one year was primarily blues: blue Petunias, Lobelias, Ageratum, with white Alyssum around the edges. A salmon pink, white and blue combination with salmon and white geraniums, and blue Ageratum and Lobelia was extremely good in front of evergreens and flanking a stair. Now, with containers, almost any colors can be used …because if you don’t like the way it looks, just move or re-pot the container!

For the more public view of your garden, usually the front yard, a color scheme that harmonizes with your home’s exterior is the most pleasing. While orange brick and bright fuchsia pinks might be exciting to some people, it is very jarring to the eye. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use bold color combinations, but that those choices should complement the house’s exterior colors. If you have a white or cream colored house you can choose most any color combination. If your house colors are brown or brick, subdued colors, gray foliage, peach and burgundy are striking combinations. If your house is blue or green, the pinks, reds, whites can be a cheerful contrast. If your house is yellow, a blue color scheme could be just the point of contrast that frames your house with complementary color. A good place to start thinking about color is my page on landscaping with color.

An example given for a brick house from Archinspire.Com portray a warm and subtly cheerful color group.

“Azaleas, flowering crab apple tree, gold mound spirea, fothergilla and viburnums were planted for early spring color. Gold mound spirea, “Royal Burgundy” barberry, red Knockout roses and “Happy Return” daylilies for late spring and early summer color. Oakleaf hydrangea, purple coneflower, liriope, “Autumn Joy” sedum for mid and late summer. For fall color, the burning bush, fothergilla, oakleaf hydrangea and Gold Mound spirea. Also, dwarf blue spruce, gold thread false cypress, ‘Blue Princess’ and ‘China Girl’ hollies along with the formality of the boxwood hedges. Decorative containers for annuals, astilbe perennials and ‘Angelina’ sedum for ground cover.”

For annuals this example would include soft faded pinks (as the coneflower and sedum perennials suggest), and golden yellows, reds and whites. This bright scheme could be used with the brick, brown, or yellow houses. Pinks come in a very wide range from soft ones such as in this scheme to very bright purple-toned hues. Those are best saved for blue or white painted homes.

Wondering whether a warm color combination (reds, oranges, yellows) is better or a cool one (pinks, purples, blues, grays)? Observe the light exposures. Bright warm colors sparkle in areas of intense sunlight (such as the south or west side), while pastel, cool colors look fabulous in dappled sun or deep shade areas (north or under trees). I wrote about this in my color page.