No one would call me an artist in the traditional sense, yet I paint periodically, excelled in a color class at the Yale School of Art while an undergraduate, and believe, modestly, that as an architect for the past 55 years, I possess a reasonably enlightened sense of color. Many of my paintings – both abstract and landscapes in oil, acrylic, and watercolor – specifically explore the interactions of various colors, their impact on each other when brought into proximity, and their emotional impact on me, their creator and viewer.
Long ago, as a nascent gardener, I took to the books, learning more from them than I ever learned from gardener mentors. (I always wished for more mentors nearby from whom I could learn, like most gardeners have had in their lives. I would today be a more accomplished practitioner if that had been the case.) I was absorbed in all the basics…just couldn’t get enough of reading garden books, even as I was completing my rigorous first year of graduate studies at the Yale School of Architecture. I read both historical treatises as well as how-to books, often the marvelous Brooklyn Botanic Garden handbook series, now sadly no longer published. Of course, color theory was a major topic in these books, a fundamental skill to master for a nascent gardener. Memorizing the color wheel – having it handy in your mind’s eye – was essential as well as all its useful, if hard to remember, manipulations such as hue, tint, value, and shade. Using complementary colors on opposite sides of the color wheel produced high impact vs. using those colors next to each other created a more soothing effect. I suppose I learned enough of all that to have an eye trained, if subconsciously, to know what I liked – and what I did not. And from Eleanor Perenyi’s masterful work of 1981, Green Thoughts, A Writer in the Garden, I also learned what a sophisticated gardener was supposed to admire and which colors were U and non-U (look it up if not familiar; think blue).
Armed with this knowledge and so much more garden esoterica, I set out to create gardens for myself over time in several different locations, including New Haven, Miami, Brooklyn, and finally, Stony Creek, on the shoreline of Connecticut. A classic English perennial border was – and still is – an obsession, no matter its receding relevance in this age of environmental sustainability. Yet…so many variables to master which, of course, is why gardening is endlessly interesting, “mastered” never and with always more to learn. How to start a new border at Uptop? Texture, height, sun or shade, time of flowering…and, especially, color. Which should be dominant? So many variables! Is such a concept today even possible given all the variables? Back to more study. So much modern gardening starts with William Robinson and later, Gertrude Jekyll and her renown English borders, deep and endlessly long. Often those borders started with one end of the color wheel and very gradually – over hundreds of feet – transitions to the other end, perhaps from cool to hot. An artist before a gardener, she used plants to color her garden palette. Harmony was her objective which, as an inventive artist, she occasionally upended by offering a jarring complementary juxtaposition (eg, blue next to orange). She solved the “variable problem” by suggesting different gardens for each season, eg, a garden with only May flowering perennials. Another discrete garden altogether for July when different perennials are in bloom… another for the Fall colors of September/October. Presumably, one did not focus on the May garden in July, for now it was uninteresting as it had returned to its all-green foliage, flowers now spent. This extravagance worked for her wealthy estate clients over a hundred years ago, but surely not for today’s gardens. I had to move on….
Visiting gardens in England for the first time in 1988, I focused on two of the most renowned which I saw in one June day: Sissinghurst in the morning and Great Dixter in the afternoon (even a brief hello with Christo!). Each supplied me with an overload of new thoughts, for I finally realized – even though I was the third-generation gardener in my family – what really significant gardens were about. Vita Sackville-West broke from riotous use of many colors by developing garden “rooms” with differing color schemes (thus solving the “variable problem,” yet, like Jekyll, within a castle/estate setting). Her famous all-white garden epitomized her restrained, highly harmonious color philosophy. Visiting Great Dixter also provided an overload of ideas – and a completely differing sense of color. Contrast – not harmonious pastels – was Christopher Lloyd’s mantra. He espoused a laissez faire attitude about color, essentially suggesting anything that the gardener liked could be acceptable. Also, what a great revelation it was that adding shrubs to the border, as in Great Dixter’s famed one-sided Long Border, could enliven it and prolong its interest. This was getting a bit closer to my emerging sensibilities.
Next, I consulted Penelope Hobhouse, especially her very useful 1988 book Garden Style, which included hundreds of jaw-dropping photographs employing a range of experiments with colors in borders.
I have lately followed matrix planting and other emerging trends in arranging plants in gardens (The New American Perennial Garden, by Noel Kingsbury and Piet Oudolf or Planting in a Post-Wild Worldby Thomas Rainer and Claudia West), admiring both the philosophy and the visual appeal of this more sustainable form of creating gardens. Fergus Garrett, the heir of Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter, caught the trend and created a most alluring new garden by renovating the outdated Topiary Garden planted much earlier by Christopher Lloyd’s father. The color schemes were alluring, especially the blues, yellows, and oranges all dotted around poking their blooming heads above a rich texture of green meadow foliage, forming a low tapestry quilt of many colors – and those ancient topiary yews never looked happier. For this architect, it reminded me of the practice of adaptive reuse, ie, how old buildings find new uses in contemporary society. Rather than “Out with the old and in with the new,” this trend is based on “Keep the old and in with the new.” It is the epitome of environmental sustainability and heritage conversation in building design. Perhaps the lesson is appropriate for garden design, as well, especially the renovation of older gardens.
The prairie now tamed and made gardenesque – often only two feet high – and a feast for pollinators! I wish this garden style had evolved before I started designing Uptop in the early 1990’s, for surely, I would have planted my own version. Alas, there is no room now in my congested one acre, and I refuse to remove whole sections of established Uptop to accommodate this admirable garden trend.
So, now to describe my lengthily evolved philosophy of color at Uptop…. Recognizing that all gardens must respond to specific local conditions (consult the “genius of the place” advised Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century), I will focus on two highly localized issues that changed how I view color in this garden: a dismal winter view of dead perennial foliage from large windows in each of the two houses on the property and increasing shade due to maturing trees throughout the garden. Each condition suggested more evergreens and fewer perennials, and thus, less color. I will illustrate the slow conversion with the story of the evolution of the North Border, once sunny. In truth, I also found that I had never really mastered all the variables required to create my vastly reduced version of Great Dixter’s Long Border which had become my paradigm. Slowly over several years, the colors of sun-loving perennials failed as the shade advanced due to the growth of a now-huge Norway maple (planted before I acquired the property and is the raison d’etre of the Woodland Walk series of gardens) along with a true thug of a neighbor’s tree, a fir planted as a “live” Christmas tree years earlier. Together these two trees, neither of which I would – or could – eliminate, ended the idea of my North Border as a sunny one. By necessity, I began to focus on leaf texture (after all, most perennials provide colorful flowers for only a couple of weeks). Leaf color was an important corollary. Fothergilla gardenii’s obovate leaves (blue-green) near Lirope muscari’s strap-like leaves (yellow) is thrilling. Stachys byzantina (gray-green) adjacent Lysimachia nummularia (canary yellow), is equally engaging, as is Hakonechloa macra ‘All Gold” adjoining a clipped boxwood (all now adjacent each other in the newly designed North Border). Even though arresting textural adjacency – not particularly color – was what I was after, leaf color was a welcomed new idea. And those bluish Fothergilla leaves even become a fiery red in October!
So began the reformation of my oft-renovated (over 30 years!) garden at Uptop, the 18-ft deep North Border. I started this transformation by replacing some perennials with an array of 3-ft boxwoods, of differing cultivars. Mostly shaped into globular mounds, they further reduced the visual dominance of the spent perennial foliage and provided a more felicitous winter view from huge glass windows in Little House. Next, a misplaced 3-ft. high yew hedge was relocated to the center of the North Border to create a series of small “pockets” by undulating the hedge and intermixing it with the box globes. These six pockets opened to the front of the border and within them I placed a series of shade-tolerant perennials and bulbs, mostly low growing. Behind this hedge were placed taller perennials and shrubs. Behind this is an 18-inch-wide path, enriched all during the year as a prime location for “composting in place” garden debris. The path gives maintenance access to the back of the border and to the 7-ft tall yew hedge (Taxus baccata), tightly clipped as a green wall.
Summarizing this treatise on color at Uptop: although color in a garden, while an undeniable component of any garden design, it is not my primary focus. I realized along the way that Italian gardens utilized many of the same principals I was using to create Uptop, even as I was heavily shaped by English precedent. Perhaps I was creating something American after all, akin to those immigrants who came to our shores long ago bringing their cultural heritage with them that would be further shaped by the new conditions in America. Shape and size; texture of leaf (and, yes, color); overall scale of one plant to another and, importantly, to that of a human inhabitant; the many architectural elements (the contemporary Arts and Crafts structures of stone and wood here at Uptop); stone walls galore; path and walkway material (brick, gravel, pine bark, stone): these elements create the overall feeling – the gestalt – at Uptop far more than the brief color of flowers. And yet… the exterior doors of the two houses, a key garden bench, and the “Gothick Gate” to the swimming pool are all pained a vivid Chinese red while other garden furniture is a shocking chartreuse. Color does characterize this garden – as in all gardens – but flowers rarely are the stars, and I care little for partnering plants for flower color: “anything goes” is not quite my mantra…but close. After all, all gardens have one overriding color: green.
