Gardening How-To

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Gardening How-To Cover Bold and Beautiful
( June 2007 Issue)

By Michelle Leise
Photography by Saxon Holt

A California Gardener Gransforms Her Hillside Shade Garden
with Colorful Art and Bold-Colored Plants

Greenhouse and Red Chair Cobalt blue is Diana Stratton's favorite color and she's not afraid to show it. One look at the greenhouse that anchors her hillside shade garden and it's clear what color makes her smile. It's the same hue that adorns tile courtyards in Morocco, where she lived as a child, and it's the color of the glass bottles she collects as an adult. "I come from a family of artists and we love color," says the veteran landscape designer. "That's what I wanted in my garden."

Diana wasn't always forthright with color, however--expecially in her Sonoma County, California, garden. When she first started taming the overgrown slope 25 years ago, she put in plants and furnishings she thought would appeal to her clients. "Most people I was working with wanted an English garden full of pastels," she says, "and I found I was designing my garden for them." Pale toned roses, clematis, and dogwoods decorated the landscape, and her greenhouse stood prim and proper in white.

Then, during a trip to Hawaii, Diana fell in love with tropical plants--including their brash reds, burgundies, and lime greens--and she was inspired to change her palette at home. "I decided I wasn't going to do this garden for anyone else anymore," she says. "This was going to be a garden for me."

Diana Stratton One way to bring instant color to her garden was to paint the greenhouse. This time, Diana followed her instincts. She sifted through photographs of her childhood and found a photo of Morocco's Majorelle Gardens, where artist Jacques Majorelle infused his gardens and their buildings with bright blue. (The color became so famous it was later named "Majorelle Blue.")Diana knew at once she'd found her color, and she trekked to three stores until she found a paint chip that matched the hue.

After seeing the greenhouse in all its painted glory, Diana gained confidence and wanted to do more. So she painted her house a tint four shades lighter than the greenhouse and coated its trim with the original cobalt blue.

Diana had ideas for accent colors, too. She'd been collecting chartreuse-colored grasses for a while, including Bowles' golden sedge (Carex elata 'Aurea'), Japanese rush (Acorus gramineus 'Ogon'), and variegated pampas grass (Cortaderia selloana 'Aureolineata'). Perennials with chartreuse foliage were also some of her favorites: Spiraea japonica 'Goldflame', Helichrysum petiolare 'Limelight', Hosta 'Sum and Substance', and Fuchsia 'Golden Marinka'.

Greenery with Steps Colorful Plants

One day she plucked a leaf of the yellow-green Limemound spirea (Spiraea japonica 'Monhub'), took it to the paint store, and matched it with paint chip. Soon that color graced the doors of the greenhouse and main house. She began to feel more at home in her garden. "in the shade, these colors just came alive," she says.

Steps with Greenery Diana also started taking liberties with plants, adding more eye-popping tropicals and hot hues to the mix. Now her Ethiopian banana plant (Ensete ventricosum "Maurelii') stands 20 feet high stretching its red-veined leaves out of the garden like a sculpture. New Zealand flax plants (Phormium tenax 'Yellow Wave') resemble 7-foot fountains with cascading striped foliage in yellow and green. Even the huge orange and green leaves of the shorter Canna Tropicanna are brassy enough to make an English rose blush.

Sonoma County weather isn't perfect for tropicals, but Diana's plot has its own microclimate. Large California black oak (Quercus kelloggii) and California live oak (Quercus agrifolia) trees give parts of the hillside some shade and a river below the property cools temperatures a bit. By irrigating with a drip system and watering an hour each day with hoses, Diana helps mimic the moist, lightly shaded environment tropicals like.

The steep terrain of the garden may have been intimidating for some gardeners, but not for Diana. Years earlier, she'd build steps, retaining walls, and patios, using salvaged materials she and her husband had collected. Now she simply had to brighten up each area. She used red spray pay to jazz up a metal table and chairs on the patio. She coated a piece of galvanized sheet metal with cobalt blue and used it as facing for an old wooden retaining wall. She put red, purple, and orange hand-painted kites from Bali in steep, hard-to-reach places on the hill.

Twenty percent of Diana's plants are in pots. She can balance these containers on steps, place them in precarious spots, and move them as often as needed. In on of her favorite color combinations, pots of red shrub roses (Rosa La Sevillana), golden oregano (Origanum vulgare 'Aureum'), and purple petunias complement larger plants like brick-red Fuchsia 'Gartenmeister Bonstedt' and pink and red zonal geraniums (Pelargonium spp.).

In other steep place, Diana planted small trees and large shrubs to hold back soil--all chosen to fit into her new color scheme. A coral-bark Japanese maple (Acer palmatum 'Sango-kaku') displays coral-red shoots in winter and bright orange-yellow foliage in summer, while Monterey cypresses (Cupressus macrocarpa 'Golden Pillar') show off limey green leaves all year. Ground covers like variegated bishop's weed (Aegopodium podagraria 'Variegatum') and creeping Jenny (Lysimachia nummularia 'Aurea') also thrive in the shallow soil, and dark-foliage accent plants like black-leaf elephant ear (Colocasia esculenta 'Black Magic") and Chinese witch hazel (Loropetalum chinese 'Burgundy') bring balance to the fluorescent tones.

Blue Chair Now that Diana has a space that reflect her bond with color, she encourages other gardeners to do the same whether it's with whites, pastels, brights, or other shades. "Recognize that you can have a connection with color," she says. "Then you can create a style and balance that's your own. "Experiment and don't take things too seriously, she cautions. And if you're still undecided, try a little cobalt blue for fun.