Approach to a natural garden.
Perhaps it is a cowardly subterfuge, but it is one which is at least safe, to keep the bright yellows and the pinks absolutely separate in any place where masses of color are used. If you are going to make your garden in one of the very hot gamuts of color, you can use the deep oranges, the yellows and browns, the scarlets, and that wonderful unifier, blue, as seen in the larkspurs, but you cannot use a certain quality of papery white in some thick petaled flowers, like the white phloxes and the Shasta daisies, which seem to spring out of any group of other flowers in which they are placed, leaving the rest of their companions looking muddled and woolly beside the intensity of their perfectly untranslucent white.
In quiet colors, some of the misty whites, like gypsophila or antirrhinum, the faint blues, such as veronica spicata, the pale yellows of some of the evening primroses, with the dull violets of aconitum autumnale and the lilacs of hesperus matronalis, make a subdued harmony less exciting than the red of lychnis chalcedonica and the yellow of helianthus strumosus, but are more appealing and quite as effective in their own way. The blaze of the high colors may be compared to the brasses of an orchestra while the quieter shades are like the strings.
No splendid and complete garden, however, can afford to shut itself out from the high colors, any more than a composer writing an opera would omit all the horns and trombones. In some places where special effects are sought the gardener may leave out the fanfare of the yellows and scarlets; perhaps his garden will be looked at often from the house or terrace on hot summer nights, and then he may wish to get the peculiar floating effect of certain white flowers which seem to quiver in the air rather than to grow on stems. Then, too, at dusk the scheme changes again as the yellow of the daylight fades and with it takes the subtler colors, leaving only the whites and some of the yellows to prevail. The elimination of detail at night and the thick quality of the light change the effect and the apparent distance of colors entirely, and give a curiously submerged appearance to the garden.
An informal garden.
One of the most important things that the impressionist school has been trying to teach us is that shadow is a color and must be used as one, and the reason why the eye seeks relief from a flat surface is not only that it instinctively resents monotony, but that it feels the need of shadow. A flat country like Holland may be made beautiful and interesting by the cloud shadows which pass over it constantly from the ample vault of its sky, but it is not easy to imagine anything more dreary than a wide expanse of level earth with no shadows at all. This quality of shadow, which must be recognized as color, makes it one of the most important factors in outdoor composition. Who has not noticed the beauty of outline of the shadows of a group of trees thrown on a lawn by the later afternoon sun, the round-topped ones making gracious curves, and the pointed ones seeming stretched out to hurry on the dusk?
A water garden.