I’ve been thinking about the colour yellow this week. It’s a colour I've come to late in life. I used to think of it as a sickly colour now I think of it as joyful. It’s the colour of sunshine and sunsets, of egg yolks, lemons and custard. It’s the colour of Dorothy’s brick road and canaries. Yellow and orange and brown are the colours of my childhood. I love orange and brown…I guess it was only a matter of time before I found my way back to yellow.
I’m developing a yellow area in my front garden that stretches from the new garden shed to the Pseudopanax laetus tree. I’ve mixed the yellow with orange, blue, purple and white…and green of course. There’s a red corner amongst it, which was planted by a previous owner (apart from the kaka beak, which I planted). The red plants are actually green leaved plants with red flowers. There’s a camellia, a kaka beak, a karo tree and an azalea, all of which are will flower before the yellow and orange flowers (or so I hope).
Below are a couple of photos of the front garden from last summer. It’s going to look a bit different this year with new plants and a bit of editing…and a new shed!
I love happy accidents. I like putting random plants together and seeing what happens. Sometimes the results are disastrous, mostly the plants muddle along looking passable, but now and again brilliant things happen. Luckily I know a bit more now then I did 15 years ago when I got my first garden. Back then I made some inexcusable blunders, usually as a result of my ignorance and impulsive nature. My biggest regret was chopping down a fledgling pohutukawa tree and replacing it with an ugly red-flowered rhododendron. Whenever I remember this day I hang my head in shame.
We’ve had a couple of bad frosts in the last week, and while frosty mornings are beautiful, they’ve proved deadly for some plants. In the front garden, which is always the worst hit by frost, the cannas lost most of their leaves as did the Begonia luxurians (which I thought was safe under the trees) and 2 ginger plants. The cherry pie was killed and is now a blackened skeleton. The Brugmansia lost half its leaves in the courtyard garden and the newly planted Lobelia gibberoa, right beside it, suffered several burned leaves. The moral of this story is to not to underestimate the plant-killer that is Jack Frost.
My garden has lots of bare soil. I’ve ordered some dahlias (orange and yellow) and herbaceous perennials for gaps in the front garden, the side garden and the fernery. And this weekend I sowed some seeds and potted up some seedlings to fill these gaps, but more on that later. First, let’s look at a garden that inspired me to use lots of yellow in my front garden.
In Easter this year I had the good fortune to visit the garden at Larnach’s Castle in Dunedin. One of its many gardens is a ‘sunset coloured garden’ (my name for it). This garden has a lot of yellow in it. It’s an exciting garden that combines different sorts of plants: grasses, cottage garden flowers, succulents and even a pine tree and strawberries. Red, purple, pink, brown, orange and yellow are combined in a harmonious way. It was autumn when I visited the garden.
The garden is built on a slope facing the sun. A holly hedge provides a sturdy and much needed windbreak from salt-laden gales.
The wonderful tall pink flowers are Joe Pye Weed, Eupatorium maculatum. It’s a very popular plant and is sold-out in most of the small bespoke nurseries. I’d love some for my herb, rose and fruit garden. It’d look lovely rubbing shoulders with Cornelia, Felicia and my no-name pear tree.
The steps lead from the ‘Sunset Garden’ up to the double flower border (I’ll share pictures of that another day).
I’m growing the large leaved plant, Lobelia aberdarica, in my front garden amongst cottage garden flowers and exotic looking plants. Seeing it growing (photo above) with similar plants to mine in the ‘Sunset Garden’ makes me feel confident that my eclectic mix of plants will look pretty good together, come summer.
Persicaria ‘Red Dragon’ (I think), in the photo above, allows other plants to pop up through it, thanks to its lax spreading habit. My friend gave me a Persicaria ‘Red Dragon’, which she’d grown from cutting. Unfortunately I stood on it while I was planting a new rose in the front garden. The Persicaria is still alive, but only just.
I love tall leggy Alstroemerias and yellow has to be the best Alstroemeria colour. These flowers look vampish in a 50s movie starlet sort of way. My garden is crying out for these flowers. I need to track some down.
Can you see the strawberries? Tucked away in the right of the photo above.
I wonder if this is Euphorbia ‘Fireglow’ (photo above). I recently bought several of these for the front garden. It looks stunning in the ‘Sunset Garden’ with the dark green holly hedge behind it.
The spear shaped variegated plant in the photo above looks like Beschorneria yuccoides ‘Reality’, which I have in my brick garden at home. I love variegated foliage and I love it here, paired with the pink wallflower. Who says yellow and pink don’t go together.
I have this perennial wallflower (in the photo above) growing in my front garden, Cheiranthus ‘Tairei Sunset’.
I’m growing yellow-hot pokers, Kniphofia, in the front garden. Last weekend I moved one and divided it, ending up with 5 plants. It flowered for me for the last couple of years whereas my red-hot poker, also in the front garden, has never flowered and I’ve had it for 3 years.
Looking back over the photos above I’m reminded that yellow is an easier colour to work with than I’d thought. I’d be lying if I said I was confident about using yellow in my garden, but I reckon yellow is looking like my latest favourite colour - along with orange and green and dark-red and purple and brown and peach and…well every colour.
The ‘Sunset Garden’ doesn’t have any blue or purple plants (which I’ve used in my front garden), but it does use blue-reds and magenta (which are close relations in my book). The green, silver and brown shaded foliage marry up the different oranges, reds, pinks and yellows. I’ve concluded that everything goes with everything if you marry it up with the right colours and even if colours clash and clang and jump out at you…so what?
Yesterday I planted all of these seeds (photo above) except for the Aquilegia, which I planted a couple of months ago. I planted the seeds and potted up the Aquilegia seedlings in my new shed. The Blackeyed Susan seeds, which my nana used to grow, have long since expired. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping they’ll germinate.
Here’s the inside of the shed and the seed trays and seedlings.
Apart from planting seeds and seedlings this weekend, I did lots of other little jobs: tidying up the dustbin and bucket garden, filling the new pots in the courtyard garden with potting mix and moving some gladiolus bulbs that had popped up in the wrong place. I planted 2 kinds of oregano in the herb, rose and fruit garden and some lemon thyme. I still haven’t pruned any plants or put up the wire supports on the fence or painted the shed door and doorframe.
Last summer I planted pineapple lilies in the 4 pots at the front of the bin and bucket garden. I thought I was very clever planting a small stem of Sedum ‘Golden Planet’ into each bucket, but i’m not so sure now. The sedum is flourishing, but there’s no sign of the pineapple lilies, not even a small nub of leaves - it’s early days I know but I have a bad feeling about this.
The pineapple lilies may have disappointed me but I’m very happy with Crocus ‘Firefly’. It’s the first year I’ve grown these bulbs. They’re the first of my bulbs to flower and they’ve been flowering solidly for weeks and weeks.
I’m not a daffodil lover…at least I wasn’t. I bought a bag of daffodil bulbs from a nursery in Te Horo. The lady at the nursery said they came from a specialist daffodil farm up the road, and the bulbs would be big and healthy looking. She said they weren’t your standard daffodils and would be great to look at. She was right. It’s a sad and cynical person who looks at these cheerful yellow flowers, windmills of sunshine, and says they hate them.
