Colour on a gray, wet day

Far from frail, puny or shrinking, these resilient pansies and violets thrive in nasty November.
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Optimism

BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and
over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the
light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs—
all this resinous, unretractable earth.

"Optimism" by Jane Hirshfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt. © Harper Collins, 2002. Source: The Writer's Almanac.

Another seven for autumn: favourite balcony colours & plants

Here's another post inspired by Gayla's “Seven things (plus some extra fun things at the end)” meme: seven favourite colours & plants in my balcony garden these past three autumns (2007-09).

1) Purple Violas

This variety is 'Plum Velvet'. It has shown resilience and vigour -- it survived heat and drought while I was unexpectedly away from my garden for 5 days in late September.

2) Red-violet pansies

 

3) Yellow violas

    

'Lemon Chiffon', a sunny face on a grey, rainy fall day.

4) Black mondo grass (Ophiopogon planiscapus 'Nigrescens')

An excellent foil for other plant colours and textures:

    

5) Acer palmatum dissectum 'Inaba shidare'

Both photos taken the same day showing colour variation between leaves at the top of the tree and those at the bottom.

6) Heuchera 'Peach Flambe'

Top photo taken a few days ago; bottom photo, two years ago.

Confession: In the top photo, the heuchera is in its new "home" (since spring), the partially shaded rockery in my Mom's garden. It's much happier there than in the container on my balcony where it was getting cramped plus occasionally sun-baked.

7) White Westie - Technically fauna rather than flora but he likes to plant himself in the sun between the black mondo grass (Ophiopogon planiscapus 'Nigrescens' ) and Heuchera 'Obsidian'.

Plum September - Shades of red & purple in the balcony garden

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Originally I was going to publish this post without any words, but this morning I discovered something about my fall garden colour choices so thought I'd share it.

I didn't consider fashion trends when choosing my fall garden palette -- I just picked my favourite hues. But this morning I checked the Pantone Fall 2009 palette and thought the red ("American Beauty" Pantone 19-1759) and purple ("Purple Heart" Pantone 18-3520) seemed close to the shades of my pansies and violas. (At least they appeared that way on my computer monitor.)

You can download the Pantone Fashion Color Report Fall 2009 (PDF) from the Pantone site. If you're still in the planning stages or having trouble choosing plants at the garden centre, the guide might help you design a colour scheme, arrange foliage and flowers, and choose containers to blend into the background or act as focal points.

But I'm not encouraging anyone to be a slave to fashion. Most important: grow what you love. And can eat, too, whenever possible.