PAINTING WITH PLANTS
How to add color to the yard, garden with flower and plant varieties, including photographs, garden notebook.
With little more than seeds and a sketchbook, you
can start dabbling in artful gardening.
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By Susan Sides
cabbage, Rosa d' Amerique lettuce and soon-to-bloom
calliopsis.
AREN'T THOSE KIDS' PAINT with-water books great? I used to
think they were magic. I was so in love with them that I'd
deliberately pester my grandmother until she'd pull one out
to quiet me. Then I'd sit at the kitchen table with a cup
of water and a little brush and " paint" for hours. It was
always so exciting to see the little dried dots in the
pictures explode into rich primary hues at the touch of my
wet brush.
Seeds are like that: little dry dots that explode with
color. (just add water!) And seed can be found to produce
almost any hue imaginable, making us free to sow bold paths
of color off the tips of our fingers with the sweep of an
arm.
The gardener using plants as pigments can control shapes
and textures as well: sinuous pea tendril, delicate corn
silk, puckered spinach green and smooth radicchio. All you
have to do to take advantage of this full palette of color
and design is look for attractive ways to combine different
plants--vegetables, flowers and herbs-in your garden.
Furthermore, artful gardening is not only colorful but
three-dimensional, aromatic and practical.
Practical? Obviously, you'll produce edible, as well as
attractive, results (no "starving artists" here). But
there's more to it than that. By intermingling vegetables,
or vegetables with flowers and herbs, you encourage
beneficial insects and confuse the homing-in devices of
harmful ones.
If you place plants with similar cultural requirements
together, tending them becomes easier too. For instance,
the bright fruits of graceful pepper plants look even
better when set off by a low border of
silver-fronded-gazanias--and both will last all season
under semidry conditions. Heavy nitrogen feeders like
lettuce and cabbage are well suited to sharing the same
spot. And combining two crops that usually require
botanical sprays will not only consolidate your work but
also limit any drift damage to beneficial insects.
