Ann Mackay: Inspired by Nature

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A couple of weeks ago, the garden seemed to be full of blue and purple-blue flowers. Now it’s the turn of pink to come to the fore. The pink flowers growing here range from the softest and palest of shades (like last week’s water lily) to the most vivid of fuchsia-pinks. The shades here are somewhere in the middle.

Clematis ‘Hagley Hybrid’ (above) is one of the softer pinks, especially on a day when the sunlight is not very strong. (I’ve seen it look much brighter than this on a day with very bright sunlight. The age of the flower will make a difference too. The newly-opened flowers are a little brighter.)

Another soft pink is the little prairie mallow above. It is Sidalcea ‘Party Girl’. The flowers are small and delicate – each one measures just 5cm across. They’re like miniature hollyhocks, which makes me wonder what it would be like to have normal large hollyhocks nearby. The difference in scale could be a bit mind-boggling!

The pink of the deutzia below is a deeper and brighter shade than the others. I haven’t yet planted this shrub out, but had been wandering around the garden with it, looking to find it a home. (Like many gardeners, I too often buy a plant and then have to work out where I have room for it!)

Wherever I eventually manage to plant the deutzia, I think it would look good with this pink salvia. (It’s ‘Rose Queen’.) The low evening sunlight shining through the pink flowers makes them glow with a rich pink which is very similar to the deutzia.

This low slanting light, whether it’s evening or early morning has a wonderful effect on the colours of plants. I’d love to be able to plant a border just so that it would catch the light at both the start and the end of the day. That’s giving me ideas about where I might plant the deutzia…

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Some flowers have a very velvety look to their petals. The two plants in this post (rose ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and clematis ‘Dark Eyes’) have especially dark and velvety flowers. But, having investigated, I can tell you that the flowers look a lot more like velvet than they actually feel. (They are, though, very soft to the touch.)

There was actually a study into the reasons for the velvety appearance of some petals. As I understand it, it’s all down to the dark colour of the flower, the shape of the cells within the petal and a low angle of light. (If you want to read all about it, you can find the report here.)

The feel of a petal or leaf is something that I tend not to think about very much when I’m planning what to plant. But there’s no doubt that textures add a stimulating element to a garden. The soft hairs on the flowers and leaves of pulsatilla (which you can see in an earlier blog post) are a great example of texture adding interest. While some plants are hairy, other plants are smooth – like the star-shaped flowers of Allium christophii, which have an almost metallic-looking sheen.

There’s lots of choice amongst the flowers that have a velvety lustre to their petals. The most obvious may be the classic red rose. Then, for instance, there are deep blue delphiniums, dark-flowered pelargoniums and purple, crimson or almost black petunias. Or, in mid and late summer, there are the rich, dark purples and reds of dahlias and the bright orange of tithonia (Mexican sunflower), which you can see here. All of them contribute something extra to the garden. They give that feeling of luxury, a suggestion of the opulence of rich fabrics, and the engagement of the sometimes-neglected sense of touch.

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As summer begins, there are a number of blue flowers appearing in the garden. My favourite colours are blues and purples, so it feels like a bit of a treat for me. The flowers I like best are those where the blue shades into a different blue or into a purple. There’s something about a colour being slightly mixed, rather than a solid shade, that makes it more interesting to see.

The plant above is Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’, aka Honeywort (or the ‘Blue Shrimp Plant’ in the USA). It’s normally an annual, but if the winter is mild enough it can survive into the next year. That’s what has happened here, so this year we have a much larger plant than we usually would.

This plant is one I particularly like for the deep blue bracts that surround the small purple flowers. The blue bracts are made more attractive by the way they are tinted with purple or green – here even the stem has a blush of purple. The colouring is more intense when it’s cold, so this has been at its best over the cool spring months. I’ll be interested to see if the colours become paler as the summer weather heats up.

A simpler colouring is that of the Baptisia australis or ‘False Indigo’ (above). Less complex than the Cerinthe maybe, but it is a lovely shade of deep violet-purple that I find quite irresistible. It’s an easy plant to grow here because it copes well with drought and it is often suggested as an alternative to lupins. For me, the Baptisia is certainly the easier choice, as lupins struggle very unhappily here and I’ve managed to lose a few.

Clematis ‘Arabella’ (below) has flowers that are a mauve shade when they first open, gradually becoming more blue as they age. So the one plant can have a wide variety of flowers at the same time. (In fact, when I looked at it today, for a moment I thought there was a purple clematis growing beside it, so dark were the newest flowers.) The soft blending of mauve and blue shades in Arabella’s petals delights me. That means there’s good chance that I’ll be trying to grow this small clematis elsewhere in the garden too.

Soon, these beauties will be joined by different shades of blue, as the flowers of campanulas, scabious, geraniums and catanache start to open. I’m looking forward to some summer blues!