Get outa here! Nail Polish!!!And you a gardener - a rose gardener at that! The state of my fingernails (chipped and permanently filthy - I have let my standards drop) - and hands and arms (bloody and scabbed)are horrific (but yep, with blue nail polish could set new records for grimliness.

Camp, take a look around the garden at dusk....what stands out in the dwindling light like beacons are the whites. Sure they are dull and boring and useless in the bright light, but late in the evening when everything else has been absorbed by the deepening light, the whites are still popping.....

I didn't say on ME. I don't wear the stuff. I mean on OTHER people.

Oh you guys are funny! :)

To each their own.. I'm not a real great White Tulip person either, but Ive seen mixtures of purple and white tulip gardens that look great to me.

I have a tendency to like pink anything.. regardless of genus.

I also only plant in clumps, tulips, daffs, crocus, whatever, its more to get myself to walk around the cool early spring garden then anything else. It still can be in the low 30s every day when the daffs bloom.

{{gwi:311284}}

also apricot, ive done my share of reds, oranges and striped tulips as well.

{{gwi:311285}}

Silverkelt

Why white tulips? Well, I once saw a photograph of a garden bed with a mass planting of about a hundred white tulips underplanted with blue forget-me-nots. It was absolutely stunning. In an earlier phase of my life, I replicated it one year.

If you are tempted to try it, you should know that it looks best if they are all the same tulip, not different varieties of white tulips. Also, it will need to have something else planted there once the tulips are done.

Rosefolly

I also saw a gorgeous planting once at Filoli, bronze and purple tulips. Knocked my socks off.

If I could grow them, I would plant them--white, pink, yellow, red, any color. You see them around apartment complexes around here but they replant every year--they just don't rebloom more than 2 years here--the heat, I guess.

So to answer your question, you plant them for those of us who would love to have them but can't and we'll plant the things that you'd like to have but can't. Deal?

White tulips...it makes me think of a cool romantic evening at a money's no object garden. There's a willow tree and a stream and perfect grass. Romantic sculpture and a bench for two. Oh yes and a balcony that overlooks it all with tall brocade curtains with a fainting couch covered in silk velvet so you can look out and see the full moon lighting up the beds of white tulips underplanted with pale purple violas.

I suppose to me it's an extravagance because to have them here they have to be bought every year and chilled for 6-8 weeks. The current craze in our local yards now is palms and plumeria. I love bulbs of all colors and shapes. Pastels appeal to me most of all but I like any color scheme that's well thought out. Some clever LA gardeners are going for hot pink, chartreuse, purple and red against bright yellow or orange painted walls.

Over the years I've grown to love white more for its timelessness and romantic serenity. It endures.

My garden will never look like a glorious mountainside in Persia.

Personally, I especially love white and yellow tulips because they prolong the colors of the daffodils of early spring. As spring progresses I like to see a transition to more saturated colors, including lots of pink and purple to lead up to the peonies and roses of June.

On the other hand, all the colors of tulips seem to me to go together because of their translucence -- for some reason. The orange ones IMO are especially glorious, and the ones feathered with green are my favorites of all.
.

Here is a link that might be useful: Claus Dalby Yellow and White tulips with narcissus

I make a point of planting some white in the garden in many types of flowers. I find they set off the other colors and make them stand out even more. They're also the bright spots that stand out when an area is shaded or at dusk as landlady said. They're a counter point to the otherwise riotous colors I plant everywhere else.

{{gwi:311286}}

And if I could find one I'd LOVE to have an ORANGE peony!

Flori, I don't get the odd ball colored nails either. Yuck!

I love them all, the short the fat and the tall (to paraphrase a semi-bawdy WWII song). But Camps imagine white tulips, a few fringed lavender blue tulips planted in semi shade under lavender wisteria with Brunnera macrophila 'Jack Frost' and some pale grayish blue florentine iris, not the boisterous fat ones but the wilder, gray-green leaved ones, with newly emerging fern foliage unfurling - romantic, other worldly in the soft light of Spring in that time between day and night. Because the area is dry, deciduous, shade the tulips would have their mandatory summer baking, here anyway. And I would have it too if it weren't for those (I don't use those kind of words) RODENTS. They eat the tulips, all of them. How is it, Camps, that you are not persecuted by these varmints like the rest of us? Anyway I have promised myself, "No New Tulips! No New Crocus!". Until I buy 1/4" hardware cloth and make cages for the tulips and crocuses (crocus, croci?).

Cath

Pale tulips look fine in gray rainy weather, which is often how it is when they bloom here in April. I can't grow tulips because of the mice close to the house and the boars out in the big garden. It's a shame because they love our conditions. I had one bed that I laboriously lined with sheet metal to a depth of eight inches or so, and it worked, but then the tulips got virus. But for several years I had one soft pink that came back reliably that was as elegant and lovely as any flower in the garden.
I have a handful of prejudices about color; for example, growing up in Florida with pink and red and white azaleas, I was never able to stomach the bluish rhododendrons which I became acquainted with when I moved to Washington (though yellows and oranges were fine). Unnatural, at least to my eyes.
As far as yellow roses go, the first thing that comes to my mind are my Rosa foetida and 'Persian Yellow'. You can't get yellower than that, but they're a species rose and its close relative, perfectly natural. I dislike some rose colors, with hard reds and oranges leading the list, but not because they seem unnatural to me. Of course many of these colors are the fruit of sophisticated hybridizing efforts, but then so is much of what we grow in our gardens.
A blue rose would be unnatural, as far as I can tell from my casual reading on rose genetics, and perhaps that's why I dislike the idea. Or maybe it's like the blue rhododendrons: a blue rose is just too distant from what I've always known to be acceptable.
Melissa

I am contemplating ripping out by the jugular several innocuously pink roses because they want to bloom in the fall when everything surrounding me is orange and yellow. I ranted about Gartendirektor Otto Linne last fall - his hot pinkness bugged me when it was the only thing blooming when the trees turned orange and yellow. I never did rip it out but am thinking about it again this year.

An otherwise nice Clair Matin's pinkness next to a coral bark Japanese maple is also making me grit my teeth. Give me an apricot, a scarlet, a flaming orange.

I'm beginning to think that all things fallish are stinky when pinky.

As far as tulips go, I plant yellow tulips which turn to a flaming orange because when they finally bloom I'm so tired of winter and early spring's grey ... I want to see some color when I look through all the grey mist and rain. Give me something with some life in it!

Tulips...ahhh..tulips. All the colors of the rainbow peek out in my garden. My kids and Gary's kids usually bring pots of tulips for Easter. And I plant them. Of course there isnt any planned color scheme. And that's fine also.
Green n ail polish brings a grin to my face. I got a bottle from the grandkids in my Christmas stocking. So when everyone was doing red, white and blue for the fourth of July...green toenails here.

Campanula, this isn't a bulb question at all. The tulips may have sparked it, but I think the underlying issue is the tension between the natural and the artificial in a man-made garden. A garden combines nature and art but it's neither all nature nor all art. It gives one a taste of nature but it can't take one back to primordial authentic nature.

Such restrictions as you're describing seem to reflect some quest for authenticity. Perhaps also some idealization of nature?

I don't like nature that much. It's definitely red in tooth and claw. It's full of horrors. It's one huge meal where everyone eats everyone else and mates mindlessly to prolong the species. What a nightmare.

Please correct me if I got it wrong, but it seems to me that while you see the garden as an extension of nature and consequently wish to adhere to nature as much as possible, I see it as an artifact composed mainly of living plants.

Can't wait for a blue rose :)

Jeannie, I love your style, LOL.

I think white tulips have their place - as in setting off the dark, dark tulip colors. If you plant the darkest purple tulips they disappear into the background of green. From just few feet away you can't see them at all - and I love that rich color. But planted interspersed with white tulips, they are on stage and the total effect is lovely. Also as Landlady pointed out, we probably all have seen how "white gardens" glow in the twilight. Same point.

I love tulips in all shades of pink. I have them planted in my raised rose beds with many types of daffodils and jonquil. The pink and yellow combination is so cheering in spring, and the pink makes me think of the roses to come later in the season. But I guess I wouldn't plant white tulips *there* now that I think about it. Then again, I wouldn't plant orange tulips, either. Doesn't mean I wouldn't admire them in someone else' garden though. The green nail polish, however....eeewww. LOL.

What a mixed bag of responses whilst I was innocently snoozing. Wintercat - yes, I can clearly see what you are saying and there is, I admit, a slightly snarky dialogue going on in my head regarding the natural and the artificial. Of course, my garden is a work of total artifice - nothing natural going on here apart from the belligerent weeds....and yet, there does seem to bit of self-imposed reactionary choices.
I do not really care for design dogma, colour wheels and 'rules' for placement and so on but much of the pleasure of gardening does consist of making little vignettes of harmony and beauty (obviously, purely subjective) and it is interesting (to me) how people exercise their choices, and having made them, how they then live with them. I also find it quite amusing that styles, colours, plants and vistas I absolutely adored a decade ago (and the reasons I so loved them)....are now anathema to me.
Little hints though, at what is driving our choices - no question that white is a serenely romantic colour which truly does look good in twilight (and yep, I do have Ivory Floradale and City of Vancouver tulips too).
Cath and Rosefolly - one of the joys of tulips are definately those clear colours and the paler one do assort very well with the pale primroses and grey blues of April....but I grow narcissi for that role. Tulips are the first real blast of exotica after a grey english winter - and I want my pulse to race when a swathe of 'Queen of Sheba' or (my current fave) 'Cairo' lolls under the sun like a shameless harlot. True, there are azaleas (Yech!) but not in my soil (no tears being shed) -and I can swoop down amongst the violets and primrose and a whole heap of other plants for subtlety.
Of course, this is why my garden is always going to be, frankly, a mess and a mish-mash of continually mucking about, replanting, fiddling about - not a restful and tranquille place at all.

In my minds eye, I see my garden as an extension of a rainbow. I love to include the entire array of colors, and there are no colors I have bias against - the more diverse, the better. But for me, despite the scientific description of white as the presense of all colors, I see it as a non-color, and as such have tended away from it in my garden. My only white roses are Garden Party (which has some pinkish blend) and Bolero (also with some pinkish hues in spring) - both included in the garden as I love their fragrances. My tulips are yellows and reds, dahlias in as many colors as I can find them in. My one exception is vining plants, I couldn't be without star jasmine (again for fragrance), and do kind of like my very common vine with tiny white flowers, whose name escapes me.

I love seeing other peoples sense of color - some gardens with just pales, others with just a few colors. But mine - I like it loud and diverse and as colorful as I can make it.

I should think about nail polish as it would cover the black that I can never get out from under my little nail stubs.

Hmmm....so many ideas....I don't have a garden. I have a piece of property whose only job is to house everything I see that I can't live without. Every view from every window is different and changes from day to week to season. Here is s tiny slice in early July...Total chaos...

I think it's lovely, Landlady. I love chaos in the garden. The healthiest things right now in my garden are the weeds.

Nature is messy. I love chaotic gardens.

I live in a monotonously gray city, and modest flowers that might look ordinary and boring in more favored settings tend to look their best here, where they are not taken for granted.

For the past few years I have been planting yellow tulips in my front yard to follow orange and purple Princess Irene and tulipa clusiana chrysantha. I can't seem to get enough of them. The warm colors seem to harmonize well with our rusticated golden brown brick brick house. My two large pink climbing roses in front will have to come out because they are showing the tell-tale signs of rose rosette disease.

Mostly, I am grateful for anything that will come back in our semi-shady conditions.

Landlady, your garden looks wonderful. I saw a garden just like yours featured in a magazine about birds and butterflies. The person had added rocks around groups of plants to make little free form islands and added mulches and gravels between them as mini paths. There was also a large sundial and a few birdbaths placed on some of the islands. Just creating groupings by surrounding the plants with rocks gave it a theme.

The idea of garden rooms may be passe now since it has been in favor so long but it allows a variety of color schemes simultaneously. More fun for the gardener.

Cath

Um, I suppose mine is like garden rooms except the 'rooms' are basically just random areas delineated by nothing much apart from heaps of tatty (but sturdyish) wooden vegetable posts. It can look really good (in parts) and is OK(ish) if you squint a bit-it's very green(weedy). Planting bulbs is a great reason to stave off winter and get on top of returning stuff to order because I have, for sure, lost the weed battle at the end of the summer.

With nearly a thing blooming, I barely make it out to ramble about anymore, I have already cut my daylily scapes and have them in the basement in case of frost, I should probably collect the cosmos seed, but have been lazy about it this year, they are really blooming late.

in regards to weeds, the annual grasses love to take over this time of year, I figure they are mostly harmless, as they die out and get hoed in the spring time. If Im really proactive Ill dig out the weed wacker and wack them back to the ground, they are barely noticible that way.

My biggest goal was to have some of my new back beds ready for daylily seedlings for the spring, I probably should have some spots ready for the rugosas I ordered from pickering, but its been damp and cold with some morning temps in the 30s already. It doesnt make me want to run out and start anything at the moment.

WHAT I really should do is check the snowblower and generator to make sure they are ready for winter, last year our biggest storm was October 31st, its just not that far away anymore, dealing with 30 inches of snow without a snowblower just isnt fun.

Thank you, kittymoonbeam.
Luckily cameras allow us some selectivity. Only last week I was looking through the camera and my thoughts were that my property looked like hillbyilly heaven....Some of it is gorgeous; some of it is ....not. But the camera allows me to decide what I will share and what is most definitely not for public consumption....:-))))

landlady, I also really like your garden with its natural and casual look, and all the different shapes and colors.

I don't do spring bulbs at all because it's just too dry for them here, or at least that's what I imagine. Also, being a lazy gardener, I tend toward plants that will look good/bloom for as long as possible, and besides the roses I favor sea lavender, daylilies (if the bushes behave and don't get too large and messy), white and deep pink pelargoniums and reblooming irises. As larger plants I have mauve and purple crape myrtles and white butterfly bushes.

Being in close proximity to wild-looking hills with giant boulders, I've found, after some experimentation, that soft colors blend in best with those surroundings. I naturally dislike bright reds, oranges and apricots, and have found that I even don't like yellow roses mixed with other colors, although Cl. Lady Hillingdon against a house wall is an honorable exception, and she has only one rose neighbor. So it's whites, lavenders, mauve-pinks, pale pinks, pale apricot (only one rose, Miss Atwood)and a single more colorful rose, Mutabilis, which however blends in beautifully since it's single and has several colors. I've just forgotten Rosette Delizy, which also has several colors, but still in a more subtle, delicate way, not like some modern roses with harsher colors. After all, they have to form a backdrop to rabbits, ground squirrels, road runners, quail, snakes, lizards, bobcats and coyotes. (I'm afraid WinterCat won't want to visit me any time soon since I have an abundance of nature, but we love it all passionately.) By now it's become a very conscious and deliberate decision to not so much try to emulate nature as to have a harmonious relationship between the garden and the wilder surroundings, which are intimately close to each other. I don't know that a different approach might not work equally well, but my garden as it is now is who I am. It will evolve, as hopefully I will too, and I hope its growth and change will be a reflection of mine.

Ingrid

Ingrid, please take a look at my post in 'The Summer Garden' thread you started on July 17:

I wrote: 'What strikes me about your garden is how open it is to the surrounding environment and how it fits into it with a kind of mutual flow'.

What struck me at the time on seeing your photos was precisely the harmony you're talking about in this thread.

I don't idealise nature but one needn't idealise nature to be acutely aware of its beauty. Horror and beauty aren't mutually exclusive, at least not in my experience.

Here is a link that might be useful: The Summer Garden

I once had a pathway lined with red and white tulips. It made you so happy you just wanted to skip and do cartwheels. Sadly, no tulips for me here. The deer munch them faster than they can grow. As to color schemes. Ha! I could never be that organized. Sooner or later I run out of room and all my good intentions are compromised. I had a bed of apricot, yellow and oranges roses. Then I needed a space for a bright pink hydrangea...

WinterCat, like you I keenly feel the horror of nature; there's no ignoring it here. It really is tooth and claw, and even my "pretty" garden is witness to that immutable pattern. I try to mitigate some of the hardships the animals face by having fresh water for them in many places and providing an environment that will sustain and feed some of them. It was rather comical yesterday watching a roadrunner try to fly straight up to catch a big grasshopper in the butterfly bush. Sometimes I'll hear a loud thwack as he smashes a snail shell on the concrete. Seeing a bobcat sitting among the roses in front of the dining room French door is a wonderful sight but of course he's looking for something alive to eat. I hope it's the roof rats!

Your comments are insightful and thoughtful. I hope you'll want to spend time here.

Ingrid

Campanula,

A different approach might be to blend from one color combination to the next ala Gertrude Jekyll in her huge border. It would not have to be posh. Just use the principle but with different execution. That way you could enjoy a variety of color combinations simultaneously.

Although I love the soft color combinations I described above, I love other colors too and, like you, get an unexplainable yen for scarlet in Spring every once in awhile.

Cath

Our weather is so different. We never get a snowscape or many grey days. Maybe that's why I don't feel the pull for strong color in the spring. My sister likes zingy colors all year. I like to change with the times of year. I can't really say seasons because we only have 2 here. Cool and hot. We get deciduous trees for approx 3 months followed by spring blooms but the grass never dies and evergreens are everywhere. Our winter is pansies, snapdragons, sweetpeas, iceland poppies and primroses. And my favorite of all, camellias. It basically feels like the same landscape but with different plants in bloom.

I try to make it feel like "seasons" by changing the color scheme of annuals. Pastels in spring, brights in summer, golds reds and oranges in fall and evergreen with white and red at christmas. That's sort of like putting up seasonal decorations and not true seasons but at least it dosen't look like 90% of the yards around me - the same all year every year. The same green trees and evergreen shrubs with the same grass. People tell me they come by to see what's new and I think what they mean is that mine is one of the few gardens around that isn't static all year.

More from Danish garden writer Claus Dalby.

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:311283}}

That photograph is amazing!

I think I need to buy some yellow tulips for pots in with my white roses.

Rosefolly

The more I paint en plein air the more I love white--because it is never really white! For the same reason I adore my metal roof. In the warm afternoon light it reflects the soft yellow tones of the sunset, on a bright sunny day it's light blue, and on a gray cloudy day it can be lavender. A pink tulip is pretty much a pink tulip all of the time. Yes, it does have changes with what type of light is reflecting on it, but not the swings you can see in white. But alas I don't grow tulips. I do however have an antique iris that is white and it is a marvel!

The other thing that I'll say for white has been said. As it grows dark you can still see it and enjoy it. I share my gardens with my friends and family almost exclusively at dusk and evening. It is the most likely time of the day you will find me relaxing on a porch and taking in the view! I want to SEE it not just know that out there somewhere are lovely purple flowers.

Monarda, thanks for the link to Claus Dalby! I finally bookmarked his site. He's very famous here for his books and TV shows from his garden.

The bottom of my garden is planted with white and yellow narcissi left to naturalize in grass. Tulips are nearly impossible here because they are deer's favourite food but I planted 10 white Purissima tulips among pink roses only a week ago. The roses protect the tulips somewhat. White because this bed is near the patio where we sit in the evenings and other colours would hardly show in the dusk. Most roses nearby are white too, climbing Uetersener Klosterrose, Quatre saisons blanc mousseux, Iceberg, La neige.

Mariannese,

When I checked La Niege, I found a gallica, a moss, and a spinossissima, Which is yours? The gallica looked especially fetching - a white gallica would be a little unusual wouldn't it?

Cath

Oh, I also love white - roses especially but for a white bloom in spring, what could be lovelier than Magnolia Stellata. Remaining convinced that certain flowers should be certain colours - obviously totally subjective and carrying heaps of cultural baggage. The last tulips went in the ground today - 50 Golden Artist. Should look well with the purple phlox and auriculas running around beneath the leaves.

What a lovely photo of white and yellow bulbs in a beautiful green setting. Soft yellows and white are wonderful together. At the same time, I'm not complaining about the more saturated yellow reblooming iris that is gracing my garden with five or six blooms right now. It's in front of Mutabilis and near fuchsia pelargoniums and purple-pink Leveson-Gower and white and pink roses and somehow it all works. Strangely, yellow roses in that area did NOT work. It may be the presence of the silvery green, sword-like leaves of the iris that somehow mutes the whole scheme.

Ingrid

Oh, Monarda, those pictures are giving me ideas!

At the used book sale today I found a book I know Camp will love....it was on creating a garden all in white flowers.

I could imagine ONE section of a garden with only white flowers (not at my house, though), but a whole garden? They say Vita Sackville-West was able to pull it off (hope I got the right person) but, having seen numerous pictures of her achievement, I remain unconvinced. Maybe you had to be there....

Ingrid

I know, it was only one section of her garden, but probably bigger than the gardens many of us have. I have a personal dislike of Vita related to her private life (which is now all too public) and that's carried over to her garden which everyone gushes about but just isn't my cup of (English) tea.

Ingrid

The book was:

"Making a White Garden by Joan Clifton"

I do have a white garden a section of the whole garden, if you don't count the coral Lycoris radiata in August nor the pink Crinum that I cannot kill nor the Spring and Fall crocus. It is unlike Vita's in that hers included many grey leaved plants to extend the effect. My leaves are an emphatically green background for the flowers, Taxus media, Vinca minor (white flowered), Nandina (white berried), Daphne odora marginata, Skimmia japonica (white berried), and the various leaves of flowering plants, roses, ('Katharina Ziemet', 'Blanc Double de Coubert', 'Sombreuil', 'Ilse Krohn Superior', 'White Pet', 'Mlle de Sombreuil', and 'White Maman Cochet' - 'Bolero' died but will be replaced in multiples), Helleborus niger, H.xhybridus and bulbs, Tulipa 'Purissima', Narcissus 'Thalia' and Colchicum autumnalis alba. The Gardenias, Citrus trees and Tabernaemontana grandiflora (an unfussy gardenia relative) reside in this patio garden in the summer so I guess that's more white.

Cath

Mmm, my son has a white garden too. He has planted MAC and a white abutilon to rampage on the walls with magnolia, hundreds of white narcissi, campanulas, thalictrum, solomon's seal, dicentra, hellebores, acteae, (in fact, Cath, many of the things you have). His co-op garden is permanently in semi-shade so white plants shine out amongst the heaps of greenery. It can be a tricky look to pull off but Rowan seems to have made the most of his limited space and his tiny garden is a little wonder.

Landlady I love your garden. I like all colors, red, yellow,green,white, pinks and purple, all on maters and not on nails.

Oh Landlady; i love your chaotic garden. Looks alot like mine. Except my specialty is weeds. One of these days I'll master online photos. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
You brightened my day.
Jeannie