Principles of Color in the Garden | Garden Home (103)

On this episode of Garden Home, host P. Allen Smith will discuss the best ways to add color to your garden. Allen will go through plants like petunias and impatiens and give you the best color combinations.

Topics Include
Chatsworth England Gardens
Colors and Mood
How to choose color for your garden
Designing with color
Impatient Flower Varieties
Petunia Varieties and design combinations
Geranium Varieties
Annual Plant Varieties
Daylily Varieties
Types of Containers

_____________
This video is made possible by the following sponsor.
(So go check them out!)

Gilbert H. Wild and Son – America’s Favorite Flower Farm and Nursery:

Home

______

P. Allen Smith is a landscape and garden designer, horticulturist, preservationist and television host. His passions span the subjects of community, health, sustainability and history. He has designed the grounds at many of the nation’s most notable estate properties, townhomes, and commercial complexes. And, for over 19 years, he has shared his green knowledge and insight with the public via ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, his own PBS television, and six book titles. Currently, Allen is focused on residential, commercial and community designs that are beautiful, improve our contentedness, and our social and physical health.

To learn more about:
…Allen’s horticultural interests and secrets, sign up for his weekly newsletter: https://pallensmith.com/

…visiting Allen’s Garden Home above the Arkansas River, see https://pallensmith.com/tours/

….Allen’s favorite plants mentioned in his social media, see: To review many of the plants Allen mentions in his posts and that are planted in his own garden, see https://pallensmith.com/gilbert-h-wild-allens-favorites/

….retaining Allen’s Garden and Landscape design firm, see http://www.pallensmithandassociates.com/

…Allen’s Garden Home-inspired intergenerational community in Monroe, LA, see https://www.gardensofsomerset.com/

—–

Want more Allen?
Allen’s Official Website: http://www.pallensmith.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pallensmith
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pallensmith/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/pallen_smith/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/pallensmith

What attracts our attention more than anything else in the garden well it would have to be color we’ll take a look at that important principle of garden design coming up next over the past 20 years as a garden designer I’ve enjoyed helping homeowners create private sanctuaries full of beauty and wonder

I find each garden to be a fresh opportunity to explore ways to create uniquely personal spaces these are just a few of the gardens I’ve helped to transform into garden hose Hi I’m Allen Smith welcome to the garden home where you’ll see lots of practical ideas and beautiful landscapes all designed to inspire you to push the boundaries of your home out into the garden and expand your living space now today’s show is all about color and how we can bring

More of it into our gardens I have to say that when I walk into a garden color is one of the first things I notice that’s because it helps to set the mood let’s look at a quick example a garden like this makes the visitor feel rested and cool that’s because a monochromatic

Color palette was used refreshing greens and crisp whites now compare this color palette to a garden on the opposite end of the spectrum bright bold colors with lots of contrast make this garden feel alive and visitors walk away energized we’ll take a closer look at how colors

Affect our moods coming up with a visit to one of England’s grandest gardens Chatsworth when you see blooms like these you have to wonder about the science that goes into making an ordinary flower something exceptional and more appealing to gardeners well it’s all in the hybridization and we’ll

Get to that a little later in the show when we catch up with a plant breeder to find out how new varieties of day lilies are developed for our gardens we’ll also throughout the entire show see how to use color more effectively now you may be thinking a garden show

This is a great idea lots of beautiful pictures but I live in an apartment so how can any of this apply to me well actually I’m a great advocate of container gardening and many of these principles will apply to a single container so where do you learn about

Using color in the garden well here’s a garden that’s not lacking for room to grow lots of color and it’s a wonderful example by any standard this is Chatsworth in England home to the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire Just birth is a lot of things to a lot of different people I mean primarily it is a great building a family home it’s been the same family’s home for 450 years a lot of people come here to see a wonderful art collection but probably as many are coming to see the garden

Because the house has got this landscape that is evolved around it and grown and developed and been enhanced by so many different generations of the family as you can see this garden is almost like a playground for gardeners of every age and everywhere you look there’s a

Lesson in good garden design if you take the time to look at a well-designed garden closely you soon discover that all of the elements of design are working in harmony elements of designs such as line form texture and of course color now I’d have to say that color is

The element that gets me the most excited you say you can do astonishing things with color you can create a sense of depth or you can make a garden actually feel smaller by the colors you choose let me give you an example if you want to make an area look much larger or

Expansive you’ll want to use a color that matches the sky a cool color like blue if you want to make a garden feel smaller or create a sense of shortened distance use a bright color like red color can also affect our mood you see those cool colors the blues lavenders

And grays can actually make us feel cool restful whereas the hot colors can energize us make us feel warm up take for instance this herbaceous border it is indeed a hot border the color scheme is very warm it starts with bright reds and works its way through orange golden yellows to

Bright yellow even some of the plant names evoke a hot place for instance this crocosmia is called lucifer other plants that help achieve this effect in the borders are bronze fennel black eyed Susans day lilies dahlias and of course that North American wildflower goldenrod now for me personally I tend to

Gravitate toward a cooler color palette maybe it is because it makes me feel more restful relaxed and quite frankly I must have a thing for the color blue just look at some of the plant combinations in this cool border agapanthus contrasted with baby’s breath the spiny see Holly next to the blooms

Of monkshood then there’s Veronica petunias lavender all set off by drifts of white that make the whole color scheme Sparkle you know one of the most enjoyable and satisfying exercises I went through was to create a monochromatic color scheme in my fountain garden there I focused on all

Whites and grays now I was so rigid with my thinking about this everything had to either be gray or white and this went on for two or three years and although it glistened in the moonlight it was actually a magical composition I began to get bored with it and over time I

Began to let other colors drift in some soft pastels in the way of pinks and lavender as you can see this garden isn’t dominated by flowers rather it’s the interplay of the silvery gray and Glaucus foliage that creates the magic in this space you know no matter what

Size garden you create whether it’s one on this scale or even in a container texture and color play a very important role The main thing to remember is just choose colors that make you happy you see color is one of the 12 principles of design that I use when I create a garden home now what I mean by a garden home is a home where the garden itself is an

Extension of the house where the living space is pushed right to the boundaries of the property where the inside of the home has folded outdoors where you have a series of garden rooms if you will now here’s a way to look at it think of using color outside the same way as you

Do inside but rather than using paint and fabric to create color combinations as you do inside your home use flowers and foliage as the paint in my garden home I have a series of garden rooms that make a circuit around the house my entire property is really quite small

It’s only 100 by 150 feet the house sits roughly in the middle with the garage and back surrounding my house are nine garden rooms and that’s what’s great about this framework because you see these rooms offer me an option to create different color combinations during different times of the year for instance

From Spring until fall my vegetable garden is full of more than good food to eat I go out of my way to incorporate edible flowers such as pansies violas and nasturtiums and flowers for cutting like these gladiolas the vegetables themselves add their own special brand of color in the way of peppers tomatoes

Swiss chard and kale in the rondell or round garden I enjoy planting pink compression tulips and lots of them which will bloom along with my crabapple trees in the spring you see the pink buds of the crabapple flower is picked up in the tulips below if you take a

Peek in my fountain garden you’ll see a monochromatic study of color using white grey and green I lean heavily on white flowering old-fashioned roses lambs ear and Artemisia now in the front of my house I have a large English inspired border throughout the year the colors in these borders range as roses bloom

Lilies open and waves of salvia carry color into the fall the garden room along the side of my house is where I enjoy the challenge of planting in the shade this garden is dominated by an ancient oak that provides a protective canopy during the hottest days of summer here I

Grow hostas Solomon seal Columbine bleeding hearts and waves of impatience so as you can see the color choices you make for your garden rooms can be just as exciting and just as satisfying as those that using the inside of your home and there’s no better way to bring color

Into your life than through annuals let me introduce you to some of the annuals I enjoy using I’m always looking for plants that help me solve problems in the garden for instance shade there’s a limited number of plants you can grow there particularly if you’re wanting lots of bloom but there’s one family of plants that always delivers and that’s the impatience there’s such a wide range of

Them starting with the new guineas you can find a myriad of color both in terms of bloom and foliage but the most impressive thing to me about a New Guinean patient is if you compare a standard impatient bloom to the size of a New Guinea just look at the difference

New guineas are almost three to four times larger their impatience for everyone whether you like the blooms large or small I recently tried a miniature variety called Firefly it’s done very well in my garden when growing impatience there’s some things you may want to know when it comes to light

These plants require partial shade that’s ideal you see too much Sun will cause the leaves to shrink or even burn and when it comes to water you want to keep them consistently moist don’t let them dry out completely when plants dry out it’s often difficult for them to completely recover if you want

To promote lots of blooms like these throughout the summer it’s important to feed them regularly about every three weeks with an all-purpose liquid fertilizer that’s high in phosphorous that’s the middle number now some of the design techniques that I use with impatience is to use a lot of the same

Color and one area whether it’s sweeps of color in a bed or in a large low bowl like this now if you’d like to get the color up to eye level try growing impatience and hanging baskets like these The summer garden just wouldn’t be complete without petunias they’re an old-fashioned sweet-smelling favorite that just continues to get better and better and there’s so many applications for them in the garden just look at these beautiful cascading petunias hanging along this fence one of my favorite ways to use petunias is to mask

Containers of them together like this where you create mounds of color petunias are such great companion plants for other flowering annuals such as a jury demand verbena now if you’re into creating drifts of coloring your flowerbeds look no further than petunias in my garden I’ve had great success with

The storm series of petunias the blooms seem to recover quickly after a rain I particularly like the combination of the dark blue and light blue together they’re great companions to classic perennials like Artemisia and day lilies now after seeing all the color petunias can bring to your garden you’re still

Not convinced to plant them remember what I said earlier they have a marvelous aroma and they can fill your garden with a sweet perfume the other great thing about these modern petunias over the old-fashioned ones is that they’re self-cleaning like the oven meaning they’ll drop their spent blossoms with ease When Americans think about adding a splash of color to their garden they frequently reach for this old fashioned favorite the geranium it consistently ranks among the top 10 annuals we choose for our summer gardens they’re a classic for adorning porches containers window boxes are even using in the flower

Garden and while the traditional red has been the color of choice in recent years there’s been a lot of work to improve not only the selection and color of bloom but foliage as well they’ve taken that bandur zone of color on the leaf and expanded it in lots of different

Ways just look at the color of this leaf and bloom what will the plant breeders think of next Between the development of seed for new annual varieties and the cell packs full of colorful plants you pick up at the garden center there lies a very important step Patrick Stefan the production manager here at Cal Harner Suri’s in Morgan Hill California shows us how they produce

Millions of seedlings each year how does this all start basically we start with the seed we fill the plug trays we’ll take this and we’ll smooth it like so once the excess is cleaned off we’ll feed it in here this is a dibbler what this does is it dibbles the soil there’s

A photo eye in here that tells it when the tray is in position once it’s been so it is covered in a medium grade vermiculite right very lightly very lightly and here it comes through by the way how many plants are we gonna get in this in this particular plug trailer is

512 plants amazing and as we move across here the eye will activate and there’s the rain there’s the ring all together we probably do about 30 to 40 million seedlings a year so once they’re watered in where do they go from here Patrick they go to the germination chamber Allan

So inside here this is just like being underground that’s correct it’s maintained at 68 degrees constant with a hundred percent humidity we hold approximately 35 racks in here which equals to about a thousand flats at a time this is called our plug range and

What we do here is once they come out of the germination chamber we bring them in here where we will hold them anywhere from two three weeks to a couple months depending on the finish time once they reach a certain size and they have a certain number of roots on them then we

Will take them over to the transplant area why do you get such a high germination rate because we buy high quality seed we look for the best seat available to make sure our customers are happy make sure we get the numbers that we’re anticipating out of a plug tray so

That’s the reason almost every one of these holes is filled with a plan yeah that’s correct so Patrick what’s going on in here looks like we’re following these impatience around you’re right what we’re doing now is we’re transplanting impatience we have a soil filling machine down there

That fills the flats there conveyor down to the transplant it transplants about 3500 flats in an eight-hour period these two people here what they’re doing is they’re making sure that all the plants are in their proper place it’s tagged watered and loaded onto the cart here is our finishing area basically after

They’re transplanted they’re put into a greenhouse for about two or three weeks in order to get them to root and to fill out the pot a little bit once they’ve reached a certain size we’ll bring them out here to acclimate them to get them in the color and to harden them off and

Then we’ll ship them to the retailers and these are just getting ready to go out these are basically ready to go out right now well as the production manager here you must get great satisfaction from growing such magnificent plant the extreme satisfaction it’s a pleasure that you’re bringing something into the

Public side that makes them smile makes them happy brightens up their daily lives the popularity of gardening is really grown over the last five or ten years I think it’s America’s number one hobby right now it’s all in the power of the flower we’ve all noticed the simple beauty of

Wildflowers along roadsides or in Meadows many of us including myself have attempted to grow these in our gardens however some plant enthusiasts look at flowers with a different eye hybridize errs of flowers look at plants four ways to try to improve them by making them taller larger sturdier showier are even

Changed their color Kevin Vaughn is a plant geneticist who moved from Massachusetts to Mississippi for his profession as well as to develop a passion for creating new flowers for our gardens day lilies seem to be one of your favorite plants to hybridize it’s just a very simple process of

Transferring the pollen to the stigma like that the pollen is a fluffy part and it lays on the stigmatic lip and if you’re lucky your cross is successful you get a little pod like this green structure right here and about six to eight weeks that pod will right then

You’ll find who you hope a great number of seeds usually not so many 15 20 is probably a very good number you’ve tagged it with whoo which appalled and you put on that particular plant right so the parents are listed right I saw you as a good hybridize you want to make

Sure you know who your parents are so that if you have to make it a really good crop you come back next year and do the same cross again during these times of constant change hybridize is like Kevin are taking the best traits of some of our most beloved flowers and making

Them even better for the next generation of gardeners what does a hybridize er look for in a flower well as a hybridize er I never look at a flower as a finished product I look at it as the next step like when this thing bloomed

Here no very nice edge but I wish it were a little wider so I’m now going to take this flower across into something with a little more pedal with maybe a hair more ruffling to enhance that fringy edge on there so I’m always thinking about the next step right we’re never happy

My friends call it yielding the lily and I think it’s a very appropriate phrase so ten years ago round and ruffled was everything if you had a round perfectly round flour and was ruffled that was it right now gadi sells and if you can make something that’s really

Bright or bold a very contrast that I a black eye on a yellow a black eye on a white something with rims of different colors that kind of thing is what the daily connoisseur is buying these days Color is a significant part of my garden in every season but especially in summer when temperatures begin to rise my color preferences change instead of leaning toward those bright intense colors that I prefer in the spring in summer I want something that has a much more cooling effect on me psychologically I’m going

For those pastel colors soft lavenders pinks and buttery yellows now when it comes to producing lots of vibrant color in your garden there’s no better way to do it than with day lilies they’re tough easy to grow they’re perennial so they come back year after year and they’re beautiful and you’ll find virtually

Every color in the rainbow among them except for blue as a designer and artist I’m naturally drawn to color whether it’s creating combinations and flowerbeds or in containers or actually coming up with some of my own colors in terms of flower color just look at some of these day lilies I’ve hybridized

These are my little babies I created them by crossing two of my favorite day lilies and have come up with some beautiful buttery yellows you know day lilies are one of the easiest flowers to grow all you need is full Sun well-drained soils and a hearty appetite for color because they’ll deliver

Certainly for me one of the most exciting aspects of the garden home is when it all begins to come together and those garden rooms really begin to feel just like that an extension of your home now I love to decorate with containers of beautiful flowers of course successful containers are really all

About the flowers you use but it’s also the care first let’s talk about containers there’s a wide range to choose from everything from plastic a styrofoam to ceramic metal and of course that old standby terracotta I’m kind of partial to terracotta myself it’s been a mainstay in gardens for thousands of

Years it’s interesting to me that the word Terra means earth and kada means baked or cooked some of the best terracotta comes from Italy often it’s denser less porous and lasts longer now when you buy a container make sure there’s a hole in the bottom for drainage and don’t forget the saucer

You’ll see why this is important in just a few minutes now when it comes to soil don’t settle for digging up some of that stuff out of your yard it just doesn’t work you want a soil that’s loose and drains well so go ahead and purchase a

Pre-mixed bag of potting soil you’ll be a step ahead when it comes to fertilizer I tend to feed my containers regularly about every three weeks with an all-purpose liquid fertilizer now certainly watering is an important component to keeping containers beautiful and healthy throughout the growing season it’s really all about

Consistency most plants require consistent moisture there a couple of ways you can ensure that one is like I mentioned earlier make sure you have saucers around the base of the plant so that they can always draw moisture up from that reservoir and the other is to use a water retentive polymer that’s

Actually mixed into the soil now here’s what happens when you add these water retentive polymers to your soil you see these little granules look like ice cream salt when water’s applied like this the polymers expand absorbing the water in your container this helps because as the soil dries your plant can

Pull water from the paw and stay hydrated longer now look just after a few seconds you can see that this polymer has already expanded from its dry state to several times its size and just by putting a couple of tablespoons of it in this bowl about a

Cup of water you can see what happens just a little of this goes a long way as you can imagine about two to three tablespoons is all I use in a like a 24 inch container As we’ve seen in today’s show color is an important principle of design it can influence our sense of depth perception making some areas feel larger and more expansive and other areas smaller depending on the color you use warm colors can excite us while cool colors can make us feel calm colors a wonderful

Way to bring personality into our Gardens it offers us an opportunity for self-expression now when you think about adding color to your garden think about painting your garden not with paint but with beautiful flowers like these and be generous paint with a wide brush from the garden home I’m allen Smith more

Information about today’s topic and other topics covered in this series can be found at P Allen smith.com on an upcoming episode of PL on Smith’s garden home oh my goodness my Gardens been flamingos I’m allen Smith you know the gardens about a lot of things including having fun join us we

Explore ways to add a touch of whimsy to the garden home we’ll look at of all things gnomes chickens hummingbirds gourds pink flamingos and much more