Green Lake Summer Scenes to Blast your Winter Blahs

Our response to color is so primal, personal and immediate, that it obviously plays a huge role in determining your garden’s character.

Here are some illustrations from Green Lake gardens and tips to get you thinking about ways to use color to your garden’s best advantage.

In Seattle, the near-constant cloud cover affects our perception of color. The colors we choose need to have the strength to pierce the haze without being washed out.  One Oregon-based paint company Devine Color designed their entire line to harmonize with the haze of the Pac Northwest.  The most visible colors to human eyes are the “Emergency” colors used in fire trucks, stop signs and caution tape -yellow, orange, and red, so adding these warm tones to your schemes will help.

Quickie Color Wheel Lesson:

•    Colors directly opposite each other are known as complementary – these are the boldest combinations, often employed in advertising to get our attention.  If your mix needs some spice, throw in a complement, or a near complement (the color next to a complement).

•    Adjacent colors are called analogous.

•    Triadic combos are groups of three evenly spaced on the wheel – red/yellow/blue is a commonly seen triad.

•    Split complementary combos start with one color, say blue, and then instead of going for blue’s direct complement, orange, split to either side of orange, adding orange-yellow and orange red.

A richly layered composition on N. 81st Street made up of magenta lychnis coronaria, lilac-toned acanthus, burgundy-leafed cotinus and in the distance, hot red crocosmia.  Color theorists call this an analogous combination, because the colors are adjacent on the color wheel.

Though vibrant, these combos produce an overall effect that is soothing rather than strident. The smoky cotinus and the slate-hued birdbath are not the first things you notice, but they are vital supporting players – they ground the grouping, tying together the more vibrant shades.  Try covering up the right side of the image and see how lost the flowers look together.

In fact, when we put this image through a free color palette generator, the resulting color chips were all muted purples, violets and greens; the reds and magenta did not even register. So don’t be afraid of bold accents – be brave!

In my garden, I love the way the periwinkle stems of the “Sapphire Blue” Sea Holly (Eryngium amethystium) pop against Achillea “Terra Cotta,” but my Gardener’s Color Wheel tells me that something is missing.  This wheel, created by garden writer Sydney Eddison, is modified to include muted hues you might see in a garden, rather than the harsher tones of the standard artists’ wheel – this makes it easier to use, but the concepts are the same.

For ultimate harmony, a coupling of blue-violet and red—orange needs to be balanced by yellow-green to make a triadic combination, or yellow-orange to make a split complementary combination.

Let’s say I go for the triad and add chartreuse. In my sunny south-facing bed, I can look to Euphorbias, add more lime-colored (lambs’ears), Alchemilla mollis, Carex grass, variegated Thyme, or a dwarf Hinoki cypress.  (Shadier spots could try Hostas, Heucheras, or Hakonechloa grass.)

As artists know, nature never makes a color mistake. Knautia Macedonica at the Woodland Park Zoo Rose Garden (750 N 50th St) shows how to mix bold colors, even with such a pastel look. Boldest plum shades the center of the creamy (yellow-tinged white) petals, but lime (the complement to red-purple) on the petals and pistils really wakes up the combo.  It got this bee’s attention, which was the flower’s plan all along.

Gold and plum put on a traffic-stopping show on N. 75 St starring this happy hydrangea.   Yellow-orange and Red-violet are near complements on the color wheel, proving that sometimes being one shade off can make a combo especially intriguing.

This contemporary town home on Dayton Ave. shines with this split complementary scheme. Despite its small size and back-border location, the high wattage of the chartreuse Spirea bush makes it a glowing focal point that echoes the house exterior. Teamed with red-violet and blue violet, the scheme vibrates with the energy of a Van Gogh painting.

These California Poppies, planted from seed in June, came up just in time to pair up with ‘Munstead Lavender in August to make a lovely complementary pair in my garden.

Read more about gardening in Green Lake.