Gardening David Wheeler
DAVID WHEELER FLYING THE RED FLAG
Many gardeners find it difficult to accommodate the colour red in their summer flower gardens, yet crave it as part of the autumn foliage palette. Is red just too harsh, too strident, too engulfing of other hues? With blue and white flowers, it can look too nationalistic, like so much flag-waving. It can overwhelm cream and pale yellows, but harmony is restored when it is juxtaposed with yolky, mustardy and ochre yellows. That said, it’s all a matter of personal taste and the way each of us as individuals perceive colour. And of course a lot depends on what kind of red it is – gutsy pink, guardsman’s tunic, pillar-box and phone-kiosk scarlet, vermilion or magenta-loaded crimson that slides towards purple, and the near-brown red, reminiscent of dried blood.
The great Canadian gardening colourists Sandra and Nori Pope, who so exquisitely ‘painted’ the walled garden at Hadspen House in Somerset several decades ago with flowers and foliage, said that red ‘spells passion, power and pizzazz – clear is the message, unmistakeable the impact. Red is stop lights, fire engines… it creates drama.’ Just a small sliver of it, they added, ‘creates an edge, a tension’. Celebrated photographer Andrew Lawson reminds us that we ‘see red’ when we are angry and ‘paint the town red’ on a wild night out.
Red is not for everyone. At one of my all-time favourite gardens, La Casella, near Grasse, in southern France, it was forbidden while its creator Tom Parr (for 35 years with Mayfair decorator Colefax and Fowler) was alive. His impish partner, Klaus Scheinert, would, however, induce mutinous ripples by occasionally wearing red socks or a red sweater in their south-facing, terraced garden, formerly a jasmine farm, that was primarily a symphony of white and green – with a masterly weaving together of pale and dark blue wisteria dripping through the pergola. The mutinous red was, to say the least, noticeable.
Red can also behave fugitively: it can fade or alter when exposed to sunlight. (See Victoria Finlay’s 2002 book, Colour, for a vivid account of red paint’s mutability in Turner’s epic canvases.)
At London’s Chelsea Physic Garden there grows one of the most alluring of all roses, Rosa x odorata ‘Bengal Crimson’, a long-flowering China rose with a naturally lax and twiggy habit, ‘distinguished throughout the year with single, cherry-red flowers’. But when I last cast an eye over this most covetable of old roses – in January, let it be noted – its flowers were distinctively pink; ‘unripe’ cherries, perhaps. Is the plant variable? Is its winter countenance paler than its summer tint? In a nurseryman’s garden on Mallorca last summer, the very same variety – if we’re still talking cherries – bore petals of the deepest morello. I have recently planted a group of five Bengal Crimsons bought from Cambridgeshire growers Monksilver, and I keenly await their first flowering to see what surprises they might spring.
The garden reds that please me most include such beauties as Tulipa sprengeri (a flamboyant guardsman of a tulip), silky-petalled, oriental poppies, elegantly tall Salvia confertiflora (somewhere between brick red and burnt orange), single red peonies, Clematis texensis ‘Sir Trevor Lawrence’, blackishred sweet williams (for fragrance, too) and any of the newer, deep-red nasturtiums that have their own way of infiltrating and enlivening other planting schemes. There’s a seemingly endless brigade of reds in the geranium (pelargonium) and hydrangea families, and, among other roses of this challenging colour, I treasure ‘Munstead Wood’, ‘Chianti’, ‘Charles de Mills’ and the wholly indispensable ‘Souvenir du Docteur Jamain’. Oh, that I could go on for several more pages…