Contemplating flower colors

[spinbaby]

I’ve always wanted a cottage garden with a rose-covered arbor and now I have one. Never mind the roses are infested with Japanese beetles, I have a rose-covered arbor, a picket fence, and a whole bunch of flowers.

When I started my cottage garden, I decided on a color scheme that used blue and white flowers as background colors with shots of pink and yellow for accent colors. That was the plan.

Blue and white worked out well. True blues aren’t common, so many of my blues, such as Russian sage and cat mint, lean toward purple, but are close enough. Bachelor’s buttons are a good true blue—they’ve become a staple filler plant and have the advantage of reseeding themselves like mad. White is a color that’s easy to find as annuals at the nursery—mostly I use a lot of alyssum and baby’s breath with some white impatiens in a shadier area. For taller background plantings, I like Shasta daisies. Blue and white leave an overall impression of lots of bloom without getting in your face and every blue or white flower I’ve introduced has worked out.

Where I find I’m having issues is in the accent colors—pink and yellow.

There are pretty pinks and glaring Barbie pinks. This does not mean that all bright pinks are unattractive—I have some lovely bright pink dianthus and portulaca. But some flowers, such as the Wave petunias I unfortunately picked up this spring, are a pink so vivid it almost seems to have an internal glow. It’s a jarring unnatural color that just looks wrong in almost every context. I can’t quite define what makes a bright pink an acceptable bright pink and what is too bright and unnatural looking. I especially have trouble with this while I’m buying plants at the nursery. I do know I’m not buying pink Wave petunias again. Next year I’ll plant white petunias—can’t go wrong with white.

Yellow has also been problematical. I was aiming for a true, buttery, lemony yellow, but so often come up with a yellow that either leans heavily towards orange or is too bright. Like some pink flowers, some yellow flowers seem to almost glow with an internal light. Some manage to be both too orange and too bright. Marigolds are the worst—although there are some acceptable yellows in the marigold family, most marigold yellows are screaming, vibrating yellows that jump out at you.

Pinks and yellows in general aren’t the issue, it’s these particular pinks and yellows. I think what happened is that that plant breeders have produced flowers in the brightest possible shades to grab attention when they are in flats at the garden center. The trouble is that pretty pink petunias have a way of turning into garish pink petunias once they’re installed in the garden.

Interestingly, there’s also an electric blue lobelia that doesn’t offend my eye like electric pink petunias and electric yellow marigolds. I think this is because blue is a color that naturally recedes and doesn’t jump out at you like yellow or pink.