• In the Garden

Thursday, July 24, 2008

The Gardening Blues

posted by Terry OShaughnessy at 23h14

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The spring beginnings of my now defunct all-blue garden. (Photo by Terry O'Shaughnessy)

I was looking at a beautiful photograph the other day of a garden planted with only white flowers. There were roses, delphiniums, lambs’ ears, and penstemon and a hundred other things, all in shades of cream to white. But I wondered: what do one-colour gardens say about the gardener? Is a garden religiously planted with one shade of bloom really only a control-freak kind of gardening gone mad?

I’m in a position to try and answer this myself.

I once attempted to plant an all-blue garden. True-blue flowers are my most favourite, and I somehow got the idea that a garden flourishing with delphiniums, irises, spiderwort, salvia and bachelor’s buttons would be crazily gorgeous and elicit oohs and ahs from all the people I would then be forcing to admire it. But it wasn’t beautiful at all. There’s not much difference on the colour wheel between green and blue, so foliage and flowers just sort of faded into to each other. Without a patch of yellow lilies, say, or a bunch of Shasta daisies with yolk-yellow eyes for contrast, my all-blue garden was a dead sea of boredom from end to end.

The all-white garden in the photograph was stunning though--so perhaps there is something to this insistence on only one colour. With results that lovely, you have to admit that control-freak gardening can have its upside.