Walk around the block yields tips, tricks, themes
Grapevines, front doors that match coleus some ideas Red, orange, amber, rust are popular picks
People are always spying on my front yard because they think I know what I am doing in the garden, so I feel just fine skulking around with my camera doing the same.
Before long on my last outing I discovered a design theme. People seem to be matching their front door, or a piece of furniture to a grouping of plants.
In a small front yard in Dundas, a chair perched on a porch nicely matched two plump window boxes full of impatiens. It was one of those comfortable metal chairs that rock nicely, and the rest of the front yard was planted simply enough that you could sit and rock and not worry about why the rhododendrons were turning crispy. As part of the basics of perennial border design, experts are encouraging us to repeat plants and colour to give a feeling of unity. So picking up the colour of a chair and matching it in plants is an interesting interpretation of the design theory.
In front of a heritage home in Oakville, I noticed that the rich red of the front door was ably matched in a patch of coleus. A large part of the front yard was planted with the ground cover pachysandra. But just at the front boundary near the street, a border of big, plump coleus edged the otherwise plain, green planting. It was showy like the fat pop beads that Martha Stewart has been wearing lately.
In a way, the landscape mirrored the house. The house was elegantly plain like the ground cover, punctuated by the vibrant red door, like the punchy coleus edging the pachysandra. A big pot reinforced the theme, planted with more coleus and ornamental grasses in shades of red.
Red, orange, amber and rust colours are the shades of September and October in the garden. They are colours that are now dominating at the garden centres. I picked up some leather leaf sedge and it’s a shade of brown that you love or hate. But I plunked it in a pot with some apricot coloured mums and it works for me. The mums were being sold in a six- pack, so they were small enough that they could be mixed into a container with other plants, a handy alternative to regular gallon sized mums. Equally alluring were the showy red dracaenas ( also called spikes) at an end of season bargain price of $ 2. Yes they are annuals but they will look just fine until the coldest weather. They went into the rustthemed containers, and I noticed how pretty the dracaenas looked when they were backlit by the sun. So the theme is slowly changing in my front yard, to reflect the season.
It’s not a theme, but maybe it will be a trend. In my walkabout I noticed a front yard that used sweet potato vine as a ground cover. It was the variegated one with leaves of pink, cream and green, called Tri- Color. It looked vigorous and festive, and would allow a bored gardener to change the “ theme” of the front yard each year. One of the most challenging design dilemmas for small gardens is achieving privacy without building a fortress style fence. Hedges can be lovely, but often take up a lot of space. In a neighbourhood prowl in Hamilton, I noticed an ingenious solution: Two front yards were being divided by a new planting of grapevine on wires strung between fence posts. The vine will need regular trimming, but it will cover the fence in no time, and only take up a minimum of space.
Ideas, tips, themes and trends, they can all be gathered with a walk around the block. Kathy Renwald is producer and host of Gardener’s Journal. Email gardenersjournal@sympatico.ca