Poor Richard’s Almanac

Silence Dogood here. Many gardeners struggle with the concept of color—how to choose flower and/or foliage colors to make a pleasing combination. But if you’re willing, there’s an easy way to play with color until you see great combinations everywhere you go. It’s painless and fun! (The hard part is making sure the plants you choose really will bloom at the same time in your particular garden, but that’s another matter.) Here’s how I learned to combine colors.

I took art lessons as a child, so I learned about the color wheel. A color wheel has pie-slices of various colors arranged in a circle so that a color and two variants of that color, one “warm” (tending towards red-orange-yellow) and one “cool” (tending towards blue-green-purple) are together. Thus, you’d have a red pie slice, and on one side of it would be a red-orange slice, while on the other side would be a red-violet slice. The red-orange slice would be next to the orange slice, and on its other side would be a yellow-orange slice, which in turn would be next to the yellow slice, and so on around the circle.

A color wheel makes basic color combinations easy. You can choose a color and its opposite color across the wheel—red-orange and blue-green, for example, or yellow and violet. Or three colors equidistant on the wheel, like red-orange, yellow-green, and blue-violet. Or any three colors that lie next to each other on the wheel.

There are many other ways you can use a color wheel to create color combinations, but I’m not going to talk about them now, because I promised you that the method I use would be fun. And while a color wheel is educational, it’s not exactly fun, is it? And it can also only show you very basic combinations. However, it’s a useful tool, and I recommend that you get one. You should be able to find one in an art supply store or a quilt shop. Which brings me to the way I really learned how to create color combinations.

I love textiles almost as much as I love plants, and have spent many a happy hour (no, not that kind) in quilt stores, putting bolts and pieces and swatches of fabric together to see how they looked. Quilt stores have literally thousands of fabrics available for looking… and combining. Because they have pretty much every hue and shade of every color, and innumerable prints, you can create quite complex combinations by mixing different prints as well as solids. And, of course, real-life gardens tend to be quite visually complex.

You’ll quickly see how just the tiniest bit of a color you’d never have thought of combining with the predominant colors can make a print pop. And because fabric manufacturers create what they call “colorways”—a collection of the same print in different color combinations—you can learn a great deal simply by seeing the different ways the designers made colors work together in the same design. This is great practice for seeing how using the same plant and/or flower shapes in different colors can create a sense of visual unity through similar forms while adding interest through shifting colors.

So, without realizing I was doing it, by having a ton of fun playing with fabric, I was teaching myself all about creating living tapestries of color in the garden. And that’s not all—maybe not even the most valuable thing—I learned.

Typically, I would go to quilt stores with friends, and it was not unusual for them to ask me to select fabrics for their quilt projects (sometimes even the store customers would do this when they saw what I was doing!). They’d tell me what basic colors they wanted, and I’d pull together a selection of fabrics, using those colors as a starting point.

When I first started doing this, I had very strong feelings about colors. I loved some and hated others. You would never have caught me choosing earth tones, for example. I realized much later that I was unconsciously preferring colors that looked good on me, such as reds, pinks, and blues, and avoiding colors like mustards and browns that clashed with my own coloration. But when a friend asks you to pick fabrics in colors you hate, well, by God, you give it your best shot. (I still remember my horror when one friend asked me to use olive-green and orange as her basic colors.) And what you find out—at least, what I found out—is that you can create a fabulous-looking set of combinations no matter what colors you have to work with. (By adding yellow-green, pumpkin, cream, and gold to that olive-green and orange, and, of course, mixing up the solids and prints, I created one of the most fabulous combinations I’ve ever made.)

As a result of this discovery, I overcame my color prejudices. (I now own a skirt that has olive-green, orange, and even mustard in the pattern.) It became a fun challenge to create beautiful combinations using colors I had never worked with, and would formerly never have chosen to work with. Playing in those quilt shops not only enriched my fabric collection, it enriched my life. Now I feel that there is no color I couldn’t work with. It’s not a question of the color itself, I realized, it’s how well you use it that makes the difference.

So I urge all of you to find a quilt shop near you and check it out. Once you let yourself get into the spirit of the game, I promise you’ll enjoy yourselves. And it could save you from some potentially costly garden mistakes!

Just this past weekend, I heard something that gave me another idea about how to play with color. I was with a group of friends, and someone started telling us about watching one of Oprah’s shows where the theme of the show was something that I remember as making dream boards. (Er, vision boards? Uh… ) The basic idea was that you took a cork board or something and attached cutouts of things you wanted in your life.

I immediately thought, wouldn’t it be fun to make color boards? You could take the same basic idea, but use your board to pin, staple, glue, or tack on various items that displayed the colors you wanted to work with. You could add hues, shades, and patterns until you had combinations that really thrilled you.

You could cut out photos from magazines that showed your chosen colors in ways that pleased you—perhaps a pattern on a piece of china, or a sofa, or a rug, or a dress, or even a plate of food; use your imagination and focus on the colors, not what they’re on. You could cut photos of plants and flowers out of catalogs (ouch! maybe you have some old ones left over from last year that you could bear to cut up). You could attach fabric swatches from the quilt store, yarn, beads, buttons, a paper napkin—whatever you have that uses those colors or features one of them.

I’d suggest attaching the cutouts and other stuff to the board in some way that’s easy to remove. Then you can move them around, or take off things that don’t really work, until you have a combination you love.

Sound like fun? I think so!

                ‘Til next time,

                         Silence