Colors can evoke many emotions from the recent holiday celebrations typically featuring red and green decorations to remembering a dear departed relative like my Dad wearing his bright Buchanon plaid scarf with his black wool herringbone coat when departing on cold wintry days for work. We pick color schemes for our homes, clothing, dinnerware, gardens and more. While I might put on my watermelon pink cardigan to brighten up my day, I like to retreat to my white garden on sultry summer nights.
One thing that always drove me crazy as a gardener were descriptions of colors in plant or seed catalogs. I would order red salvia seeds when the plants really turned out to be a burgundy or orangy scarlet. Until these Pantone Colors of the Year started sprouting up, I didn’t give much thought to how colors could be standardized – not in plants of course, but when purchasing paints, clothing, paper items and other things. The Pantone Color Institute came up with a standardized color matching system used worldwide so designers, printers and others in the industry could create the same shade whether the product was made here or abroad.
In 1999, they launched their Pantone Color of the Year, obviously a marketing ploy that became very successful and even is reaching us gardeners. Their 25th Color of the Year is Peach Fuzz 13-1023 and I love this color. I’m not quite sure I’m aligned with it’s colorful and downright sensual vignette: “PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz is a heartfelt peach hue bringing a feeling of kindness and tenderness, communicating a message of caring and sharing, community and collaboration. A warm and cozy shade highlighting our desire for togetherness with others or for enjoying a moment of stillness and the feeling of sanctuary this creates, PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz presents a fresh approach to a new softness. An appealing peach hue softly nestled between pink and orange, PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz inspires belonging, recalibration, and an opportunity for nurturing, conjuring up an air of calm, offering us a space to be, feel, and heal and to flourish from……” but I love the color. Many run from peach and orangy colors but I embrace them. In part because my house is a pale peach, and I am always looking for those perfect plant accompaniments.
Warm colors typically evoke autumnal feelings and while I do find it easier to color accessorize the house and gardens especially at that time of year, it really is not too hard to do it year-round. I might not always use peach, but it is pretty easy to find plants with peachy or orangy flowers or foliage. Here I have a paperbark maple, with its enchanting cinnamon exfoliating bark surrounded by tangerine impatiens. The front brick walkway is lined with orange celosia and there’s a peachy copper colored coleus under the front window. Another year the front walkway was lined with Profusion zinnias in various orange shades.
My old house is not set that far back from the road, so a picket fence was erected along the front and one side to give a bit of privacy but also to create a garden room delineating that part of the yard. The fence is lined with dahlias all in shades of orange, creams, and yellows. My two favorites are Peaches and Cream with its tricolor blossoms and Elise with peachy-cream single flowers and bronze foliage.
Container plantings work well to continue color themes even if mixed with contrasting colors like the two shades of peachy impatiens combine with the lavender annual vinca. In this combination, the impatiens won.
There are so many peachy plants for the garden beds, whether strictly perennial or even to brighten up the vegetable garden. Take daylilies, for example. With the myriad of shapes and colors expanding each year, one should have no problems coming up with peach shades like this Double Siloam daylily.
Heucheras or coral bells have been developed in an amazing assortment of foliage colors including some wonderful caramelly peach shades. The tiny bell-shaped flowers are a delight to hummingbirds.
Hummingbirds also are really attracted to nasturtiums, and I grow them in containers on my porch railing, so I get to see the hummers up close and also in the vegetable garden where pollinating insects, like bees, also rally to greet them. I find they do better in garden soil than in containers.
While there is a wealth of colors to be had, it’s hard to find the color peach in those pots of double mums for sale in the fall along with pastel asters and ornamental grasses. The old-fashioned single mums that often accompany the sale of old houses can be found in both pale pink and soft peach. My house came with the pink ones, but I came across these at the Tolland County Master Gardeners plant sale a few years ago. They bloom until almost Thanksgiving and provide a late source of pollen and nectar for insects.
Hope this year turns out just peachy for you!
Dawn P.
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