Did I Mention that Chartreuse is My Favorite Color?

As usual, long about now, I am reveling in the abundance of hopeful, fecund, joyous chartreuse everywhere I look.  I've read more than once in garden design books that "one" (English garden books, after all) should be careful not to "overdo" certain colors, or perhaps variegated leaves, or perhaps certain textures.  I'm in total agreement with that, as an often-bewildered designer…with one exception.  I can never seem to get enough chartreuse.

Surely I could, I suppose, but the backdrop of what I do here are these hulking huge doug firs, Sitka spruce and rampant laurel hedges.  The perfect dark foil for the utter abandon with which I add the vigor of yellow-gold.

This time of the year, in addition to all that I have added to the palette, the new spring growth on even the most somber and darkest greens is erupting from every leaf tip and branch to add to the revelry.

 For me, chartreuse is the new neutral.  It goes with everything!  There was a time when I thought the vibrating cacophony of fuchsia and chartreuse would make me dizzy just to imagine it, but at the moment I am intrigued by the bergenia 'Eroica' and the berberis 'Pow Wow' as they dance in the Long Bed.

yes, 'Eroica' is in your face, but she makes you smile!

Another combo often avoided is violet and chartreuse.  In New Orleans, purple, green and gold are associated with Mardi Gras, and many folks down there will actually paint their houses, decorate their Christmas trees and dress for a party in this bold combination.  The King of Mardi Gras, Rex,  over a hundred years ago, decreed them his colors and the entire city has made them the "official" colors of the season.  As a floral designer working there, I dreaded the Mardi Gras season which stretched from Twelfth Night in January all the way to the day before Ash Wednesday (hence, "fat" Tuesday).  Every ball, wedding, dinner dance, debutante party, convention buffet and even funeral casket sprays were purple, green and gold at the determined request of the client (or his family in the latter case!).  Yes, New Orleans is a bastion of glittering, gleaming, bodacious and brash questionable taste, but we tolerate and actually enjoy this idiosyncrasy in the Big Easy…

Perhaps, despite myself,  my long roots in New Orleans allow me find violet and chartreuse appealing.  Yes, I know they are compliments on the great theoretical color wheel, and the eye comfortably associates the two, but something magic happens in my garden when the allium and Japanese forest grass harmonize in the Long Bed,

…and the brunnera blooms and the hosta 'Blackfoot' (which also blooms violet!) buddy up. 

Many of these charming plants will mellow out into a much more respectable green as the spring and summer proceed, but at this moment, when everything is new, I celebrate my best, most favorite color, in the whole wide world!  Yay for chartreuse!

Taxus baccata 'Nana Arborescens'

Acer palmatum 'Tsuma Gaki'

euphorbia groundcover

golden hypericum just emerging

Acer palmatum 'Ghost Dancer'

Weeds and Seeds

...it's a funny moment when the dance in the garden is a constant contrapunto of the pulling of weeds and the planting of seeds.  I have to get the weeds sorted out before I can plant the seeds.  But the labor is not so crisply defined.  Those weedlings may indeed be seedlings of something I want.  How sharp have I gotten to tell by that cotyledon who's a keeper and who's a bodacious thug?  Now's the time to root all this out.  A few weeks from now, the window of opportunity will close, and the now-fluffy soil will tighten up, the foraging roots will wander, and my desirables will become languishing weaklings instead of the robust beauties making a grand display.  Meanwhile, as I scratch my head in wonderment, I am surrounded by unidentified green stuff jumping up out of the ground.  I can practically hear the subtle snapping sound of those little leaves unfurling...

Many of these guys I now know intimately, and have devised strategy after strategy to assume control.  Fat chance.  This garden thing is relative to one's ability to control anything in life.  How far do you want to go before you succumb to the inevitable?  Stuff happens.  Some of us carry the burden of way too much stress trying to control things.  I stopped wearing a watch eight years ago and still get where I need to go on time.  It was a good lesson for me.  I must apply this sensibility to weeds and seeds.

Italicum pictum…beware

Italicum pictum is my most vivid example of a battle gone bad.  When I cleared what is now the middle terrace of my garden from waist-high blackberry and ivy, I found a thriving community of these little buggers just waiting for some sunlight.  I thought the lovely succulent arrow-shaped leaves were quite refreshing, after the horrible thorny thatch of blackberry canes.  They were beautifully marbled, then produced a curious spathe in my favorite color chartreuse, and later morphed into a colorful spike of red berries.  That first year I foolishly planted the seeds here and there to encourage them to spread...oh Goddess...what did I do?  The more blackberry and ivy I cleared, all the way down to the creek, the more italicum pictum sprouted up.  I should have known I was in trouble when I casually mentioned to Dan Hinkley at a social event that I was curious about its range...he got a strange look in his eye then said, "Be careful".

I spent many hours this winter browsing catalogues, making lists, ordering unusual seeds (Jamaican burr gherkins???) and then devising this wonderfully intricate chart to plant these seeds in my garden on the precise lunar and astrological date to maximize germination.  I listed the germination temperature, the days required for germination, the days likely to maturity, the necessary rotation cycle with the other plants in the mix.  Many many facts came into play to help me control the situation to my advantage.  Then a little unanticipated "jazz" entered the scene...on planting day perhaps I was otherwise engaged, or I forgot to buy the right seedling mix, or the grow lights weren't working, or ...it was raining, you name it...the perfect day came and went.  I planted anyway.  The seeds emerged anyway. And so it goes.

 I try to remember what I do right each year, rather than belabor the amended plans.  I try to jot down in my journal or my field notebook (If I can remember to put it in my pocket) what worked well.  For example,  I wish I had noted the date I planted the 'Drama Queen' poppies...they came up by the thousands!  On the other hand, the other varieties I planted the same day, in other areas of the garden are completely missing in action.  I've had great success with many types of beans and have therefore, made a great study of their diversity of habit and dozens of ways to prepare them.  This year I plan to plant fifteen varieties!  Peas, however, continue to elude me…often too early or too late planted…much more needy in their requirements.

The peas I will replant.  The italicum pictum will come back, and I will yank them out where they obscure my lily shoots or smother the erythronium and convallaris (watch out!  a thug replacing a thug!!??)

The dance goes on.