Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen Glühn
` Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom;
Amid the dark foliage the golden oranges glow?’
Amid the dark foliage the golden oranges glow?’
(Goethe, 1749 – 1832)
Goethe ‘s poem "Mignon's Song" alludes to Italy
but its famous first lines sum up our climate well; it seems so apposite just
now as our cumquats and other gold, amber and orange fruit nestle in the
night-green foliage of the citrus trees in the lower part of the orchard.
(Below the septic run they receive neither watering nor fertiliser; the cumquat
– closest to the competitive gums - is generally the most forgiving and
fruitful - if fitfully this year.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) was a German
writer, artist and politician who studied law in Leipzig and wrote treatises on
botany, anatomy and colour; and four novels.
All I knew of Goethe yesterday was his poetry but he also
theorized on morphology and his ` “analogie", was used by Charles Darwin
as strong evidence of common descent [of mammals and] of laws of variation’ and
he was interested too in meteorology, formulating a theory of plant
metamorphosis; he has been called the first physicist of his time. What a man.
But I’m most interested in colour – especially in the
garden.
In 1810, Goethe published his `Theory of Colours’ and his
observations on the effect of opposed colours led him to a symmetric
arrangement of his colour wheel, 'for the colours diametrically opposed to each
other… are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye’.
Unlike Isaac Newton, Goethe's concern was not so much
with the analytic treatment of colour, as with the qualities of how phenomena
are perceived. Philosophers have come to understand the distinction between the
optical, as observed by Newton, and the phenomenon of human colour perception
as presented by Goethe who influenced artists including the Pre-Raphaelites.
Others theorized and wrote about colour but I was unaware
of Goethe’s theory.
At last, too, I know where other garden writers get their
7-colour wheel from: Isaac Newton and the scientific rainbow of prism-split
white light; but this doesn’t help us plan our garden pictures appropriately,
nor in the best way.
[It seems that the magic and mantle of science must be
applied to all. I’m a science graduate myself, trying to learn about art, so
going to Newton’s colour wheel when planning a garden artfully seems
ludicrous.]
How the human eye perceives light is a more useful way to
look at our art critically. The artistic-minded Goethe’s 6-colour wheel (above)
makes far more sense and works in our gardens; it’s also how I learnt about
colour when I studied horticulture.
As we all know, primary colours (red, yellow, blue) are
mixed to create the secondary colours (orange, green, purple).
Complementary colours are adjacent on the wheel: yellow
with orange; blue with green; red with purple…and still should be used with
care together in the garden.
Green
and yellow are neighbours and used together can create wondrous garden of
interest, peaceful to the eye, restful but still charming; here the leaf textures vary but so do the shades of green: soft,
hard, glaucous, chartreuse; marrying well
with blooms of soft gold; all bound within hedges of firm green.
Contrasting colours are on opposite sides of the colour
wheel, which is why Goethe’s wheel works and Newton’s does not.
So for complete contrasts we look to red with our green,
blue with a little – just a little – orange, or yellow with purple if you must.
But just a little history for a moment.
However
formal or natural-looking the garden, for it to come together and satisfy,
modifications must occur; `the essence is control’ says Hugh Johnson.
Good
design entails unity and repetition, proportion and perspective. Sympathy with
the site; form and function. Some upright foliage and change in texture. Most
of all, for many, consideration of the use of colour: contrasting or
complementing, jarring or gentle, obvious or receding.
I don’t
just mean flower colour by the way, leaves are important too. If I ever garden
in Queensland I’ll need to be careful to choose my plants wisely: so many large
leaf tropical plants available seem to rival the rainbow and I’m just not used
to that; I like my leaves in the green range until autumn arrives (although this
may be pure prejudice or habit).
But look
to a master like Laurence Johnston who first considered colour in his garden at
Hidcote Manor (above), c1902, and see how he combines purple Prunus leaves with bronze Phormium, deep red roses and scarlet Geum all backed by crisp emerald hedges.
Tall wisps of fading Rogersia in ruby
and bronze give accent along with bronze-leaf red-flowering Dahlia and Salvia officionalis purpurea.
Johnston,
who gardened in Gloucestershire, influenced poet Vita Sackville-West; she wrote
a gardening column for the British Observer
newspaper and when she shared her ambition – in print - to commence a white
garden she began a quiet revolution. In January 1950 she wrote `I cannot help
hoping that the great ghostly barn owl will sweep silently across a pale
garden, next summer, in the twilight, the pale garden that I am now planting
under the first flakes of snow.’ Poetry indeed; I think we need to remember the
importance of emotion and magic. White flowers gleam at dusk and recede with
the ascendency of the sun; some emit fragrance, too, at dusk, and placed near a
window or an outdoor chair extend the garden experience by hours. (Just add an
anti-mosquito plant like Pelargonium
citrosum, or Balm of Gilead (Cedronella canariensis).)
Sackville-West’s
garden at Sissinghirst Castle in Kent, created with her husband Sir Alfred
Nicholas, also contains the noteworthy so-called cottage garden which is filled
with flowers in every shade and hue of yellow and orange; a delicious sight,
all comfortably kept below knee height.
From
this I like to remember that while a one colour garden (or two; her `white’
garden is of course filled with green also) can be very exciting to behold the
first time, 2 colours or shades of (say) pink-mauve-blue or if you are braver
magenta-purple-indigo can be more satisfying and probably a little easier; how
many bad imitations of Vita’s white garden have been made? Too many! They need
lashings of green (and arguably a little silver to soften), they need vertical
accent, punctuation, some white notes (flowers generally; these need to be a
pure, even dazzling white, not cream) through the seasons without swamping one
(remembering some in summer and winter, don’t be lazy), some focus, and a
definite structure to convey the message that this is all planned.
Those
above (yellow and orange, or blue and purple-mauve) are of complementary
colours; that is, the colours are neighbours on the colour wheel, or on the
rainbow. If they are pale like pink, mauve and lemon, they are a tint of a
colour on the wheel (white has been added). But why not invigorate your garden
with contrasting colours, those from opposite sides of the wheel? This teams
secondary colours with primary thus: green with red, orange with blue, or
purple with yellow; I’ll admit I’m not a fan of the latter. But a field of red
Flanders poppies amongst the green grasses in spring can be a stirring sight!
Colour can of course be separated by time, as well as space.
And so, when my mother’s orange tiger lilies thrust up stalks with look-at-me vigour in summer, I enjoy teaming them with tall sky-blue Salvia for a month or so, when little else peeps above the ramparts. Cranesbills are – reasonably – wilting along with bugle and other spring performers which exit, stage right, with summer’s parching winds.
My
current project is a Sun and Sky bed of about 20 square metres on the south
side of my house, and here I am trialing sunny and buttery roses, Geum, Coreopsis and lemon Phygelius with cool blue Salvia,
sky-blue Veronica and delicious smoky
Orthrosanthos (Native Iris or Flag);
a more golden-hued version of the picture above.
More
exciting can be gardens of silver with raspberry-coloured flowers; pale green
and purple; or those with leaves of gold and silver with flowers of white and
chartreuse. Endless ratios can be played with; such fun.
Or, as
Jekyll writes, why spoil a blue garden because you have called it that – if it
needs some pale lemon (or gold) to contrast then add that.
Here in
Melbourne the Botanic Gardens have a long perennial border, gardened in the
1980’s by Donna Somerville according to the ideas of (another Brit!) Gertrude
Jekyll, author of `Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden’ (1908). The border was
a symphony beginning with blues, lemon and grey leaves and then the flowers
warm up to yellow, orange and a little red at the centre of the border; then
the colours cool, slowly and gently receding to mauve and violet-blue, not
true-blue (there is a difference) at
the other end. I saw it and absolutely fell in love: with colour.
Jekyll
also advocated a gold garden, and a grey garden, and other ideas that I don’t
like (I think her gold-leaf hedge backing is too much and I have seen a
grey-leaf garden and may I just say that despite my love of green flowers, I
lack the subtlety to appreciate greyness); but the context must be remembered:
the silver & grey are placed to refresh the eye after seeing a border of
orange flowers, and after the grey, `entering the Gold garden, even on the
dullest day, will be like coming into sunshine’. It’s a clever artist who can
manipulate emotion without words.
A lot of
Brits fell in love with colour after Sackville-West’s writing forced colourism
into the public’s consciousness; but while these days they aim for `tasteful’
gardens, I think our naïve enthusiasm is preferable – just.
So just
as some Australians began flirting with colourism in the 1980’s, gardener and
writer Christopher Lloyd threw the cat amongst the pigeons in Britain by planting
red lupins with yellow, purple Allium amongst gold-leaf shrubs and pink and red
poppies together where they reflected the russet Tudor house rising behind. He
annoyed his readers when he pulled out the roses in his mother’s rose garden
and again when he claimed he’d planted yellow flowers with purple; the Brits
must be easy to shock. (This reminds me so much of my first client, a lovely
gentleman with a city courtyard, who informed me he wanted, and I quote, `an
orange wall’. It transpired, after discussion, that he desired what I would term a terracotta-coloured
wall.) For those of us so fortunate as to have attended the last landscape
design conference in Melbourne, images of delicious colour are still burnt to
the retina after a lecture by head gardener to Lloyd, Fergus Garrett. Lloyd’s
yellow was no such thing! It was lemon, and lime, and soft green, and
chartreuse.
It wasn’t paired with purple Allium alone, it was joined with some bronze fennel,
and grey-leaf mullein, and orange-leaf Sisyrinchium. Dwarf lemon-and green-leaf
bamboo and light, airy sweetly lemon Aquilegia made it all sing. Delicate
choices, not crude!
Where to
see this in our wide brown land? In our own Yarra Valley at Cloudehill Garden
and Nursery Jeremy Francis has created long cool and hot-coloured borders with
panache, along strong linear axes. Like Lloyd, he fills the beds with bulbs as
well as perennials, and has some shrubs backing as well: mixed borders. But
here I find many people are drawn to the cool borders, those of pink, mauve and
powder-blue, and they eschew the fabulous hot borders that dare to throw strong
beams of red, orange and yellow in the midday sunshine. This is part
predjudice, part habit, part not looking properly: when the light is strongest,
it’s the strong colours that stand out while the pastels fade away. It’s
safety, and lack of courage too.
Another
landscape designer whose planting schemes I admire is Peter Cooper of Wychwood
at Mole Creek in northern Tasmania. Where Francis’ design outline is, however, formally
rigid, Cooper’s is sinuous, but both show skill in placing plants for textural
and colour impact – and harmony.
Green
After a
hot Melbourne afternoon all I want is to be refreshed in green: the grass is
cool, the leaves grant merciful shade, and the colour gives relief.
Green
itself can make a wonderful picture, if texture is planned well, and here there
are tints and shades (black added) of green creating a restful mixture,
certainly not dull, but sublime.
Do city
dwellers miss the colours of the bush, of nature, of green in particular? And
is that why lawns are useful in the city, even on the coldest, wettest of
wintry days: just to be seen (or for remembrance of sitting on them in summer
as well)?
I think
we all need to see something of the natural world each day, and while highly
clipped lawn or skeletal deciduous trees are poor surrogates, the soul can take
nourishment from these, a vase of roses or a fine gum tree until we next enter
a garden or a place of more natural trees, shrubs and possibly flowers or
water; and most Australians, I think, prefer an area of less rather than more
ordered beauty.
I believe city folk can be deprived of green; trees are
ideal but at the least a little patch of lawn, to sit on come the summer
months, is necessary for our emotional health.
Green and orange
Green and orange are nearly opposite on the colour wheel
but share some yellow; the contrast on my citrus trees is cheery on these cold
winter days. Visually, it’s a pity to pick the fruit but I’ll collect some
cumquats for the best marmalade known to woman. As an impatient person, fast
microwave marmalade (and 10 minute raspberry jam) is my style; no stirring for
hours here. I’ve adapted an old recipe to make more (and to use an easy 1kg bag
of sugar) and I overcook it a little to give a caramelized flavour which I
love.
Jill’s Quick Cumquat Microwave Marmalade Recipe
(I often add a lime or 2 to the mix.)
Pick 1kg Citrus fruit, mulch, I mean blend
Add 2 ½ cups water and stir
Pop in the microwave for 10 minutes on high, stir occasionally
Add 1kg sugar and stir well
Then 30 minutes on high, stirring occasionally
Cool
a little. Taking care with the hot
marmalade, pour into sterilised jars (about 4 or 6)
Within 1 hour from fruit on the tree you have delicious
marmalade!
And while I’ve made marmalade with Seville Oranges (my
Dad’s favourite), Honey Murcott Oranges and many odd mixtures of citrus orange
and amber, it’s Cumquat, which was my Mum’s favourite, that is the finest.
