COLOR ECHOES

As with most things I do, when it comes to my garden, I like getting bang for my buck. I want the biggest WOW-factor for the least amount of effort, and I've picked up a few tricks over the years.

The first thing I learned was to stop choosing all my plants based on their flowers. If you can get past that hurdle, you will make huge strides towards having a better looking garden, for a lot less moolah. If you are choosing shrubs and perennials based on their flowers, you have to keep in mind that those flowers may only last a couple of weeks. What will that plant look like for the other 50?

Annuals bloom for a much longer period, but most all of them prefer either hot weather or cool. So at the end of that one season, you rip them all out, head to the nursery, and start all over again. Instead of zeroing in on the blooms, look at the plant as a whole - it's structure, it's foliage, it's berries, it's bark. Some of my very favorite plants never bloom at all!

Another trick I picked up is "color-echoing". One of the best gardening books out there, when it comes to pizazz, is Making Gardens Works of Art, by Keeyla Meadows. She believes that an appealing garden composition has much in common with a successful drawing or painting -- it needs a strong focal point, such as a tree, bench, fountain, or other feature, and the focal object should interact with its setting, bringing into play whatever is around it. She makes fabulous glazed ceramic sculptures, pots and plaques, which she uses as focal points throughout her garden, then she chooses her plants to "echo" the colors in her sculptures, and those of the other plants nearby.

That is why I love having Bright Lights swiss chard planted in my corrugated metal pot. The chard's pink and orange ribs echo the pink and orange ridges of the pot. Beneath the tree where my crazy "Lucy" bird feeder and chili pepper wind chime hang, I have planted a grouping that echoes the precise colors of that ceramic wind chime. In the photos above, check out the way that lime green sweet potato vine makes the same color pop in that funky Schwarzkopf aeonium next to it. See the way the magenta veins of those pink petunias echo the magenta veins on the perilla's foliage, and the black mondo grass picks up the black veins of the sorrel planted nearby? See how much color there is in the garden, but how little of it comes from flower blooms? That, my friends, is how you get bang for your gardening bucks!