I came from a University that painted one of its colleges purple and orange and I drew the line at that. No purple and no subtle cooling blues, just an outrageous display or orange. I need to work on that chakra anyway! Like many people with minor mental quirks I thought I would do some personality research first. Google ‘Personality colors and meanings’ and you might come up with:
If Your Favorite Color is Orange
- With orange as your favorite color, you are warm, optimistic, and extroverted and often flamboyant. You are friendly, good-natured and a generally agreeable person. Sounds like the person I used to be.
- You may be lousy at housekeeping as it is not that important to you – – a little dust on the mantelpiece is not that important to you and people soon learned to wipe their feet as they left the house. However you love to cook.
- You move on easily from life’s setbacks. So on and so on. Question to ask do you wear that color and feel comfortable it it?
Now having researched it I went to Purple:
If Your Favorite Color is Purple
- Having either purple or violet as your favorite color means you are sensitive and compassionate, understanding and supportive, thinking of others before yourself – you are the person others come to for help – being needed motivates you but sometimes people take advantage of you
- Being a purple personality, you have a peaceful and tranquil quality.
- You are very intuitive and quite psychic. Throw in creative as well
- You are idealistic, and often impractical.
- As a personality color purple, you are a generous giver, asking for little in return except friendship
All more true of me than Orange! All this came from this site. I think they also should include: Being unfocused and jumping from one thing to another.
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Back to my ORANGE GARDEN!
Most of us tend to avoid those pumpkin oranges. Personally I view them as needed cholerics in the garden scheme. Aside from having gone to a college majoring in unstable characters, I always thought orange was especially beautiful when combined with blue or black. Clivia and mondo grass, or the more common Agapanthus.The two plangts shown are Crocosmia Prince of Orange and a Fritillaria.
It is more traditional to link oranges to normal and harmonious bedfellows, red and yellow. Personally I like squaring’s and hop right over the color wheel to blue or purple. That really brings out the paprika in me.
How much to use, to spice up your garden is something you really shouldn’t even think about. Life is too short. Spice it up. If you need to –just do it. The edits can always come later.
Personally I am planning on an ALL orange garden, no willy dallying with subtleties, let the Crocosma ‘Emberglow’ fight the ten rounds with the underweight Calendula or California Poppy.
Put in as much orange as your damaged ego needs. One of my own favorites is Arctotis, an African Daisy, or Dimorphoteca sinuate. WOW! Orange Cosmos, Orange (purple foliaged) Dahlias, Orange Pokers, Mexican sunflowers, Tithonia rotundifolia. Best of all hummers and butterflies will be flying to your garden in droves.
So will garden gawkers! I hate them all. For them I will plant orange with Ann Lovejoy pinks. Outstanding I say. Shall I interest you in a Diascia or two? YUM My calendula is practically aquiver to accost those pink wimps! So is my Poker “Bressingham Comet’– bring on those comely Pinks!
Seriously, it will be an all-Orange garden, with only a few purple foliaged things let in. Ligularia Othello, my orange to your purple, with Houttynia cordata stealing not so quietly beneath. ** This would make a supremely vulgar garden bed. The Purple foliaged Dahlia, and maybe a few Loves Lies Bleeding associated with CA poppies and a Euphorbia myrsinites or two.
** As I once wrote, ‘Inviting Houtynia into your garden bed is link inviting the Hells Angels into the choir.’ You are blinding me with your descriptions say many of my friends.
This was written a few years back before I binged on Variegated plants. I still think the red hot poker “Bressingham Comet’ remains one of my favorites. That is one plant that should be very thankful that Alan Bloom got his green hands onto. Man’s a genius. The specie Kniphofia Pfitzeri is quite lovely as well.
This garden will be in the South of my house, a good place for these warm colors.I left out a few good suggestions: (remember I am a zone 8)The plant above is Lewisia who is somewhat fussy about wet winters!
Late SUMMER:
Zuschneria californica for simply a garish ground cover. Late summer bloom. Chinese Lanterns might be thrown in as well. YA!
Crocosmias come in all sorts of different colors from ‘Soltaterre’/Norwich Canary Apricots to the red of ‘Lucifer’. Alstroemaria too!
WINTER: Iris foetidissima with Arum italicum — they would be in a calendula bed as well.
SPRING: Fritilaria imperialis with calendula YA!
(If were in shade — I certainly would use the Fuchsia Gartenmeister)
Other plants include Helenium, some of the orange yarrows, verbasum’s such as ‘Cotswold Queen’, #1 Phygelius capensis (Japanese Lantern). #2 Erysimum and
#3 Libertia peregrinans. A copper-bronze that goes well with black mondo grass. YA!
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An all gold garden would be nice and easy to do to.
Garden gawkers isn’t really what I mean. Garden pinchers is a better description — I have had so much stolen from my Nursery (worst yet two were fellow Nursery-persons) when I had one. It no longer was funny. One time I even had something lifted at a garden club while I did a presentation. The other thing is ideas. Things that I have done finding customers photograph the garden, then duplicate it in their own, and claim it as theirs. It is for people like that I enjoy the idea of creating really ghastly things of beauty!
© Herb Senft 2005 (Skyline Nursery)
A special thanks also goes to a well-known Nursery that took a lot of my plants and then passed them off as his own introductions.