{"id":7292,"date":"2012-06-06T01:48:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-06T05:48:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-08-13T18:17:00","modified_gmt":"2020-08-13T22:17:00","slug":"purple-cut-flowers-june-jubilee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardern.co.za\/2012\/06\/purple-cut-flowers-june-jubilee\/","title":{"rendered":"Color Palette Combinations in the Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Entirely from the garden, this bouquet is not only a stylish palette, it is intensely fragrant – rich with the scent of Heliotrope, Sweet Peas and Stock. It’s color palette may seem simple, but nature designed flowers to be more complex than we think. The color wheel here is broad and deep, and luminosity, transparency and saturation happens not in Photoshop, but with the sun.<\/p>\n \nAs a graphic and visual designer professionally, it’s not surprising that the most common question I get from friends and colleagues, when they find out that I have this gardening blog, is about color palettes. We all have favorite colors, and color taste is a very, personal thing, but there are some foundational rules to consider, rules that are hard, if not impossible to work around. The most important rule about color in the garden, is to accept your environment first, most likely, it exists in multitudes of green. Choosing a color palette combination for a garden is completely different than choosing color for paint or interior design. The physics are different outside, in nature, and in many ways, it’s closer to choosing colors for a web site or a digital experience, because light suddenly comes into play more than ever. After all, plants flower for one purpose only – sex. They are designed to attract insects, so the built in features are closer to a video game or a pixel than you might imagine.<\/span><\/div>\n \n <\/span><\/div>\n \n<\/div>\n \n<\/span> ![]() \n<\/div>\n \nLike it or not, always remember that your canvas outdoors is primarily green and grey, depending on the season and the light angle. Foliage and dark shadows dominate the garden, and color, is precious, often appearing only as specs and dots in the landscape. Like pixels on a screen, nature uses color to attract, often with added features such as luminosity, refraction and layering of transparent tints to achieve a special effect.<\/div>\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n \n<\/div>\n \n<\/div>\n \nStill, if you are just planning the perfect June wedding and are looking for a more thoughtful or stylish color palette, don’t limit yourself to the printed catalog or magazine – try going outside and studying the woodland or the garden for a moment. The above image demonstrates that sometimes, there is something just “right” about certain combinations. There is a reason why hip flower sites show blush, champagne and plum flowers – all Photoshopped with filters and de-shadows to look perfectly pale, but do you ever see this in real life? nope. Wedding blogs and hip stylish florist school sites know design quite well, but they also can manipulate images to appear, well, prettier than they actually are. Gorgeously yummy, but not very realistic when viewed in real life. <\/div>\n \n<\/div>\n \nFlorists aside, in your garden, or, in your cutting garden, which is really should be two different subjects, the logic is different – the lighting is real ( either the sun, or in your home), and the plant material is not flown in from all over the world, it’s seasonal. So forget Gerbera, lilac, Peony’s, Billy Buttons and Hydrangeas all in the same arrangement – it’s just not gonna happen. I know many of you want amazingly coral, pink, peach and buff – when in reality, this rarely is achievable outside of photoshop and creative lighting. Few of us live in a magazine photoshoot or a wedding blog with a handy color shift feature. But there are ways to add new and more interesting color palettes to you garden containers, new color ideas for your wedding, or new color palette combinations for the garden. <\/div>\n \n<\/div>\n \nIf you want more posts on my color theory and plants, let me know – I think a little too much about it sometimes! But I do know my color theory, I work on a Wacom screen all day picking palettes for design projects, ranging from apps to print and product, and I am a pretty handy horticulturist, so maybe I can offer some sensible help here. It’s a subject that I can frequently post about if it doesn’t bore too many readers.<\/div>\n \n<\/div>\n \nA few basic things to remember when buying plants based on color – if may have already discovered that seed catalogs and nursery catalogs are terribly misleading. They show closeups of flowers like coral zinnia’s or blush poppies, but the reality often is that 95 percent of the plant will be green, and 5 percent will have a flower with the color that you want. Of course they assume that you already know that the two plants will bloom at different times of the day, and year, and that the seasons will be off. There is just SO much to know.<\/div>\n \n<\/div>\n \n<\/div>\n \n ![]() \n<\/div>\n \n1. Heliotrope – Heliotropium arborescens ( seed sown February 20th – Swallowtail Gardens<\/a>.<\/div>\n \n2. Iris versicolor – “Cat Mousam’ (Joe-Pye-Weed’s Garden<\/a>)<\/div>\n \n3. Parsnip Flowers – Pastinaca sativa, I always leave some in the garden to bloom (Johnny’s<\/a>)<\/div>\n \n4. Stock ‘Quartet’ – Mathiola incana (seed started March 12th, Johnny’s Seeds<\/a>)<\/div>\n \n5. Society Garlic – Tulbaghia violacea<\/div>\n |