Photo by Michael Spencer

MICHAEL SPENCER
This fountain grass and bulbine planting relies on color contrast.

Photo by Michael Spencer

MICHAEL SPENCER
Color contrast used with repetition leads the eye into the space.

Photo by Michael Spencer

MICHAEL SPENCER
Aspidistra and dianella provide high color contrast in a very low light situation.

It’s useful to view your garden designs from at least two levels of magnification. At the first level, imagine the entire garden on a single sheet of paper. This overview allows you to make connections, resolve buffer requirements, analyze circulation issues, and, most importantly, establish focal points.

These focal points are key to your design. Why? By understanding how your garden design is experienced visually, you automatically establish motion — the motion of the garden user as she moves, either physically or visually, through your garden spaces.

An example for the neophyte: Your car approaches your house, it slows, turns. What do you see first? Next? Your eye naturally lingers at each focal point. These are the natural place to spend design time and your money. Everything else is green mayonnaise.

Your design pundit calls it “sequential design,” and there’s really nothing magic about it; the idea here is to lend cohesiveness to the whole, and to introduce interest and motion.

At times, created focal points are part of the design. Japanese gardens will sometimes control your view, for example, with the quality of paving — rough paving that makes the pedestrian concerned about slipping will force the eyes down, while a transition to more secure materials underfoot will naturally allow the eyes to float up, often to a constructed view that can be inspirational, thrilling, or even witty.

Getting particular

The second level of magnification in your garden design involves, at least partly, choosing plant materials. A couple of things to keep in mind in the ornamental landscape:

1. Horticulture rules. There are countless examples of plantings where the plants are dying from improper light or water or salt levels, for example. And please don’t make me crazy with this “natives” are best stuff: see my website for an explanation of why this isn’t always so.

2. Use mature sizes. Pick and space your plants based on mature size, unless of course an endless maintenance commitment is part of your design goal. Space shrubs about 80 percent of mature width.

3. Mulch is depraved! Minimize it by covering the ground everywhere with plants, grass, or hardscape. With time, planting beds become mostly self-mulching.

4. Only reprobates prize variety. Limit your choices. Imagine plant masses as your unit of design. Find the right plant, and use it. Don’t fiddle around.

5. Contrast is king. Contrasting shrub masses make your garden sing. And in our world, contrast comes in two flavors.

More about contrast

The first category of contrast is texture: A plant with coarse texture, for example, has big leaves, and a plant with fine texture has small leaves. Simple. More generally, texture is the relative size of the component parts. The components are the leaves.

Arrange your plants so that adjacent plants have dramatically different textures, creating huge interest in the plants.

Similarly, adjacent planting beds with strongly different color will immediately interest the viewer (and gardener). Color needn’t be expressed by flowers, and in fact very often is represented by leaf color only.

Be careful here. Sometimes, a plant combination with very similar colors but different textures can be an interesting design solution. Similarly, adjacent plants with similar textures but contrasting colors can be useful. Be creative.

Finally, Vanderbilt Beach

I’ve written countless times about how much Suzie and I use Vanderbilt Beach. Nestled at the end of Vanderbilt Beach Drive, this little pocket park is truly a gem. It’s a friendly, cozy environment, perfectly suited for this small beach. And the parking is free for County residents.

There are only two problems: first, not enough bathrooms.

The biggest problem, though, is Collier County’s plan to spend $1.2 million on a humongous “facility,” complete with observation decks. What were they thinking? The proposal also includes competition for nearby businesses.

The plan is a monster, completely missing the scale of this tiny beach.

Take a look at  Dave Trecker’s piece on the Naples News website (a href=”http://bit.ly/HRCMqb”bit.ly/HRCMqb/a😉 for a thorough discussion of the issues, and then call your commissioner. This is simply stunningly bad design with no respect for the neighborhood or for the existing users.

Conceptual drawings are available here: a href=”http://bit.ly/HS597h”http://bit.ly/HS597h/a;.

Michael Spencer, ASLA, has been practicing landscape architecture for 26 years and is president of MSA Design Inc. Visit his website for cost-effective consulting arrangements. He also offers a monthly/quarterly Landscape Assessment Service for HOAs and homeowners to catch problems early. Email Michael with your questions (a href=”mailto:ms@msadesign.com”ms@msadesign.com/a).

When he scans his racks of 150 trowels and 350 watering cans, he is reminded of rural subsistence farmers over the centuries and their backbreaking labor and hungry families. During a recent tour of a fraction of his tools on loan through July 1 at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum in the Bronx, he asked, “How many people’s lives did these save; how many people did they feed?”

The show, “Dibbles and Daisy Grubbers: The Art of the Garden Tool,” has more than 100 pieces organized by function, including seed scattering, hedge pruning, fruit harvesting and asparagus digging. Pausing at an array of devices for killing insects and rodents, Mr. Morrison said, “This is cool, all the critters.”

A mole fork on view could be stabbed into the ground above a burrowing creature’s tunnel to create an impassable wall of vertical tines. “It’s kind of like Rikers,” Mr. Morrison said. He added that he did not bring his more hazardous pest-control implements, including some that still have traces of DDT.

He has been collecting for 35 years, paying up to five-figure prices per tool and mainly working with dealers in Europe. He said he has not hesitated, even when offered machines for chopping ice and irrigating lawns.

His finds are installed on custom supports around his rooms. “They’re not just nailed to the wall,” he said. “They’re thought out.”

He has also tried to identify past users. Queen Victoria wielded one of his trowels at a ceremony at Kew Gardens near London, he said. A Victorian weeding hook with a leafy silver handle also appears to have a pedigree.

“It’s not confirmed that it’s royal family,” he said, but he added that it was clearly meant for scraping between paving stones at someplace palatial.

He has considered turning his New York property, in Wassaic, into a museum. For now he gives tours, by invitation only, to people who like to learn about gardening or can pretend they do.

“If you’re going to look, you’ve got to get at least a little bit excited,” he said.

The Bartow-Pell museum was particularly interested in hosting the Morrison show now because the staff is raising money to restore its 1910s terraced gardens. The prestigious Manhattan firm Delano Aldrich designed flowerbeds and fountains behind the museum’s 1840s stone house, and now the landscape contours, irrigation system, rows of horse chestnut trees and 18th-century gravestones all need repair.

On Thursday American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced that the Bartow-Pell garden was one of 40 local projects that the public can vote for, enabling them to receive grants totaling $3 million from the Partners in Preservation initiative.

GERMAN STONEWARE

When Charles W. Nichols, an ophthalmologist in Philadelphia, starts describing his German stoneware, “some people think that they’re going to see beer steins,” he said in a recent telephone interview.

He is donating much of the collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art; 40 of his pieces go on view there on May 5. The exhibition, “The Art of German Stoneware,” contains vessels meant to hold salt, sand, medicine, plants and of course beer.

In the catalog from Yale University Press the curator Jack Hinton explains how medieval ceramists dug clay out of mine shafts and set off clouds of acid fumes while formulating salty glazes. European aristocrats displayed the laboriously worked wares in their homes and had their coats of arms molded into the clay.

The stoneware also came with patterns warning against sinful behavior. On jugs in the Philadelphia show, Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, and drunken peasants are shown vomiting and letting their beards run wild. The occasional procession of saints appears as well.

“The imagery loosely functioned as a reminder to avoid excess in order to achieve salvation,” Mr. Hinton writes.

Dr. Nichols has been collecting the works for about two decades and places them in clusters on his 17th-century English oak furniture. He has paid up to around $20,000 for a vessel, through dealers including Michael Dunn and Jonathan Horne. (Mr. Horne died in 2010.) Part of the subject’s appeal is the diversity of forms, which the potters kept expanding in the 1700s to keep up with new porcelain factories.

The Philadelphia exhibition includes figurines of musicians and animals made around 1740, the last gasp of German stoneware artisans. “They were trying to compete with other ceramics areas, which they lost out to,” Dr. Nichols said.

A BROOKLYN CERAMIST

A show about Edward Lycett, a largely forgotten Brooklyn ceramist, arrives on Thursday at the Brooklyn Museum after a yearlong national tour. For its final outing, the museum has added 18 pieces that place Lycett (pronounced lye-SET) in the context of the buzzing 19th-century industrial scene in Greenpoint.

In the exhibition’s catalog, “Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company” (University of Richmond Museums), the historian Barbara Veith traces his career from teenage apprenticeships in his native Staffordshire, England, through his American commissions to paint President Andrew Johnson’s china.

In his heyday in the 1880s Lycett served as art director for the Faience factory at the Greenpoint waterfront. The company never managed to diversify past his signature bulbous forms and gilded Moorish and Japanese patterns, and it closed soon after he retired in 1890.

The Brooklyn Museum has bought and borrowed vessels made by neighboring artisans and companies like Charles Volkmar, William Boch and Union Porcelain Works. Their products reached Lycett’s extremes of eclectic gilt but could also be as sensible as sink faucets, doorknobs and water filters.

Lycett’s sons, Francis, Joseph and William, all became ceramists, and the Brooklyn Museum has turned up examples of their work. William died in murky circumstances in 1909 (he was either murdered or committed suicide); his distraught father outlived him by just a year.

Ms. Veith said that since the Lycett show started touring, his family members have contacted her and that works by other obscure Greenpoint makers have turned up. The Brooklyn Museum has acquired a gilded cream pitcher by the Empire China Works, which was better known in its day for electrical insulators and knife sharpeners.

A bloom on a coral tree at the new North Campus gardens of the Natural History Museum.

Citizen science is also encouraged. Planted with edibles, the Erika J. Glazer Home Garden is open for classes, camps and school groups to teach them how to grow organic vegetables and to deter pests with beneficial bugs rather than chemical pesticides. The Nature Lab, scheduled to open in June 2013, will become a place for visitors to sort and identify the bugs caught in the garden’s tented “malaise traps.”

Even nature lovers who are curious about what happens in the garden after hours will have the opportunity. Critter cams have been installed throughout the garden to capture video that will be posted on the museum website.

The North Campus is part of a museum renovation that not only celebrates the institution’s 100-year anniversary next year but also revitalizes its mission. The garden is scheduled to open in full next summer. The entry plaza, eating area and bridge that connects the outdoor gardens to the indoor museum are all open to the public now.

The new North Campus gardens advance the notion that landscapes have to be performative, said Mia Lehrer, right, the landscape architect behind this design as well as the Los Angeles River revitalization master plan and other regional projects that marry community engagement and environmentalism.

“Performative is a term that embraces sustainability in a very deep way and implies that any solution to create spaces somehow leaves the place better than it was,” Lehrer said.

The North Campus replaces 153,000 square feet of asphalt parking lot and concrete hardscape. About 102,000 cubic feet of concrete sidewalks, stairs and walls were crushed on site and recycled into the garden. In their place are more than 200 varieties of perennials, 31,000 plants set along a half-mile of winding, decomposed granite pathways that allow water to permeate and replenish groundwater. The benches dotting the paths are wooden beams reclaimed from a fire-damaged building. Much of the decorative fencing is made from reclaimed wrought iron.

All of the site’s storm water is collected and shuttled to deep aquifer recharge wells, preventing runoff and feeding the pond, which was designed as a metaphor for the Los Angeles River. During the dry season, the river appears as a dry stream bed. (That’s Wise, head of education and exhibits at the Natural History Museum, at right.)

“We’re not trying to make this garden a chaparral or true pure native Southern California,” Lehrer said. “We’re trying to make it an instructional and hopefully beautiful place for people to learn about plant materials, to learn about what they do for us. When you find a spider in your bathtub or on your plants, you realize what it’s doing for you. You don’t automatically want to squish it.”

— Susan Carpenter

Common yarrow, Achillea millefolium, blooms in the 1913 Garden at the Natural History Museum’s North Campus.

 

Young corn stalks rise from the new landscape, designed to be a demonstration site providing ideas and inspiration to visitors.

 

New plants begin to climb palm trees crafted from rebar in the 1913 Garden.

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Photo credit: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times

Flooded with light and warmth and scented with herbs, the new store is part of the long stretch of renovated historic buildings between C and D Streets on Puyallup Avenue, just down the hill from the Tacoma Dome. The landlord’s colorful plantings on the outside echo the greenness inside, and Goetz has made good use of the large, brick-walled space to stock another of her obsessions – gardening books and magazines.

“My secret obsession is buying and selling vintage garden books,” says Goetz. “That’s how it all evolved.”

The space has another unusual installment for a garden shop: comfy sofas and a table-and-chairs corner. For customers who liked Goetz’ former News Tribune feature “Fix My Yard,” where frustrated gardeners sent in a photo of their yard for Goetz to make over with a penciled-in design, this is the place to go.

“People can bring in photos and get advice without signing up for the whole designer thing, just one hour of time,” says Goetz, who also intends to hold classes in the store’s back space beginning in May and serve as a meeting place for gardening clubs and parties.

While the Dome district might not immediately spring to mind as a prime retail location, Goetz is confident about the store’s placement.

“Tacoma Bike (next door) is a very busy place, and while the guys take in their bikes the ladies come in here,” she explains. “I get people walking down from the Museum of Glass, and there’s walk-by traffic on ArtWalk nights. It’s surprising.”

Goetz is also connecting with the Tacoma artist community by stocking local work, such as Jennifer Chushcoff’s framed ivory encaustics with embedded stems and flowers.

“I want to offer a sense of community here, and ways to be creative in the garden,” she says.

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568 rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com blog.thenewstribune.com/arts

Even in spring, when many plants haven’t yet come out of winter dormancy, the Japanese and Asian sections at the San Francisco Botanical Garden shine brightly. Perhaps it’s because so much of the appeal of the Japanese design style is in its careful layout and use of hardscape.

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Japanese garden design also makes use of evergreen plants that have a strong form, year-round foliage color, or textural contrast. What else makes a Japanese garden special? Read on for some hints gleaned from the San Francisco Botanical Garden (located at the corner of 9th Avenue and Lincoln Way in Golden Gate Park).

Ground covers

The use of ground-covering plants is a traditional element in Japanese garden design. Mosses are often used, but ground-covering plants can have a similar effect, of creating a contrast between the form of a tree or shrub and the subtle undulations of the ground. The San Francisco Botanical Garden has many shaded areas where mosses have been successfully established, but you’ll also see  mondo grass and other ground covers. [See second photo above; click on arrow at right base of first photo to go to the next one.]

The benefit of ground-covering plants instead of mosses is that most ground covers have a little more height and vigor to them, so can better out-compete weeds in the landscape

Use of stone

In any garden, stone provides an instant feeling of maturity and timelessness. Jagged stone creates drama, while smooth cobbles evoke the same calming feeling that water in the landscape brings.

Stone is regularly used to create pathways because the smoothness and size of the stones can determine how fast people walk the path. In a meditative area of the garden, a pathway should have fewer or smaller stones that take more concentration to navigate, while on a more highly traveled path the stone would be larger and smoother to allow a faster pace.

However, paths to a home would often have a zigzag shape, as it is thought that a circuitous pathway deters malevolent spirits. [See second photo at left.]

My favorite element of stone in the Japanese garden is the use of stone carvings and structures. A hand-carved granite bowl or lantern never fails to make me marvel at the perseverance of the human spirit. In our impatient modern lives, to imagine an artisan taking days or weeks to slowly chip away at a hunk of stone and unveil the art beneath is to remember the vital importance of beauty in our lives.

Water and ponds

In the Japanese garden, water is a symbol of renewal, calm, and continuity between life and afterlife. There is something primal in our nature that responds to the sight and sound of water, and I think that no garden, Japanese or otherwise, is fully complete without it. [See first photo above.]

In a Japanese pond, two stones may be placed to signify the turtle and the crane, symbols of long life and good health. Read more about the symbolism of water by clicking here.

Native plants and materials

In the botanical garden, of course, horticulturists are re-creating a display from another region to enlighten and inform. Yet one of the integral design aspects of a Japanese garden is in the use of plants and materials local or native to the region. A Japanese garden is rooted in a sense of place. It makes use of the views from over the garden fence (called “borrowed scenery”), and integrates the stone, wood, and plants found on the site or in the region so the garden feels at one with the surroundings. [See first photo at left.]

That’s not to say it isn’t carefully designed. A garden is at its best when it reflects some of the themes found in nature, yet elevates and interprets those themes into an artful expression of human interaction with the land.

Click here to read my eight do’s and don’ts for designing an Asian garden.

—–

Genevieve Schmidt is a landscape designer and garden writer in the redwoods of Northern California. She shares her professional tips for gardening in the Pacific Northwest at North Coast Gardening, and on Twitter. To read more of what she has written here at Diggin’ It, click here.

International garden design company Fisher Tomlin have just revealed details of a new floating bird hide designed for a wildlife park in Normandy. The unique idea aims to get bird watchers up close and personal with migratory birds on a series of wildfowl lakes at the park. Bird watchers can enter the hide at the bank and then gently float out into the lake without disturbing other wildlife to watch the birds.

Founding Director Andrew Fisher Tomlin said “This has been a bit of a departure from our usual work but a very logical one. We are increasingly involved with designing habitats for wildlife and in recent years have worked on a number of ecological projects including the new wetlands on the London 2012 Athlete’s Village. So designing opportunities for visitors to enjoy the benefits of wildlife habitats is a natural progression.”

Fisher Tomlin have previously designed wildlife houses including a bee hotel for ‘Beyond the hive’ that is now housed next to Smithfield Market in the City of London. The new bird hide will be built and launched in its new location in the near future.

Further Information
Fisher Tomlin create gardens from their offices in Wimbledon, London and Chobham in Surrey. The company provides design and horticulture services for residential gardens and parks across Europe and beyond for which they have received a number of international awards.

For further information please contact Andrew Fisher Tomlin on
Email – andrew@fishertomlin.com
Telephone – +44(0) 1276 855900 or +44 (0) 7957 855457
Website address – www.andrewfishertomlin.com

This press release was distributed by SourceWire News Distribution on behalf of e-Zone UK.
For more information visit http://www.sourcewire.com

To help lessen the impact of cars, Cleve is using hedging (some beech and some
mixed native) to screen vehicles while allowing higher views to the
surrounding countryside to flood into the garden. After much consideration,
resin-bonded gravel was selected for the paving, being almost runway smooth.
To add more interest, Cleve has included different coloured polka dots of
resin-bonded gravel and one will include a memorial stone dedicated to
Horatio. This, together with an arched walkway clothed with apple trees (a
favourite of Horatio’s), were incorporated by Cleve as he felt that although
the garden was proposed before Horatio’s death, many more donations were
received after the tragedy.

To add personal touches, Cleve is hoping to put stones in the flower beds with
words of inspiration (from the patients themselves) carved into them.

The structure of the garden is defined by three curved dry Cotswold stone
walls about 450mm (18in) high. These represent the spinal column; two are
cut through into two sections by a pathway. The third is entire, symbolising
the work of the unit. Silver birch or amelanchier trees will add structure.
Wide beds, some 6m (20ft) deep or more, are filled with planting. This will
be composed of many grasses: Sesleria autumnalis, Stipa, Panicum and
Miscanthus. Shaggy box balls will add permanent green, and herbaceous plants
and herbs will add colour and aroma. Acanthus, Echinaceae, Sedum, Agastache,
Pervoskia, Foeniculum and Aruncus ‘Horatio’ will be planted among the
grasses to create colourful, dynamic, moving swathes of planting.

Apart from the main garden (which includes an airy Cotswold stone-covered
space for use in less perfect days), Cleve has included a more utilitarian
space with raised beds and a greenhouse so patients can grow plants and
produce and use them in their adapted kitchen.

This project has gained a lot of momentum and since Cleve has come on board,
the garden is developing with a distinct style which no doubt will raise
awareness of the importance of garden spaces for people who are suffering.
Hopefully the success of this project will spark many more like it and
encourage the patients and their families to create a favoured outdoor space
when they return home.

Bunny Guinness is giving a talk on ‘transforming your garden’ on June 22 at
the Organic Garden, with proceeds to Horatio’s Garden. For tickets go to ssit.org.uk
or call 079350 54622

Members of Milford’s Greenleaf Garden Club held a floral design workshop in Mendon recently to celebrate spring.

“Bringing in Spring” was the focus of the semi-annual design workshop led by club member Hazel Schroder, at her home in Mendon.

Garden club members created a seasonal design which used spring colors and flowers. A rectangular glass vase was lined with coils of pussy willow branches and filled with boxwood. Mini-carnations were placed in parallel rows and a line of three roses topped the center of the arrangement.

As they design, participants study and share thoughts about the use of color and texture and explore the elements and principles of design. The resulting arrangements brought a lovely touch of spring into each member’s home.

The Greenleaf Garden Club is always looking for new members. Call Jean DeLuzio, 508-473-7790 for more membership information. The club is a member of the Garden Club Federation of MA, Inc. and the National Garden Clubs, Inc.

An exceptional Italianate-style garden in the Wairarapa has been placed on the market for sale ending the two-decade guardianship of the historically-significant 3.76ha property by its current owners.

The Carterton property is called ‘Richmond’ and reflects both Wairarapa’s early history and more recently, 20 years of dedicated and meticulous green-fingered input from owners Melanie and John Greenwood. John Greenwood is a leading Wellington property lawyer and the couple are relocating to the capital now that their children have left home.

Recently assessed as a garden of International Significance by the The Royal Horticultural Society’s New Zealand Garden Trust, Richmond Garden is based on 16th and 17th century Italian formal plantings admired by the Greenwoods on travels to Italy. The gardens represent tranquillity and peace which is achieved through the repetition of themes, straight lines, water and symmetry.

Richmond Garden is unique in New Zealand and captures many moods throughout twelve months of the year. It has been open to the public by arrangement and the owners have also run a successful nursery business from the property, Boxwood Topiary Nursery, which is now closed.

The historic homestead was built in 1887 and was originally home to Carterton’s first town clerk, Henry Wolters, a wealthy German immigrant who held that office from 1887 to 1901 and made a substantial contribution to the town and district until his death in 1926.

Wolters’ home was named after Richmond Palace in Brunswick, Germany, where he was born. The property was a social hub in the district and hosted many gatherings including the wedding of his eldest daughter Frances who married Katherine Mansfield’s cousin, ‘Burney’ Trapp in 1910.

A 1900 Cudell De Dion Voiturette car, owned by Wolters and a familiar sight around Carterton in the early 20th century, is now in Southward’s Car Museum in Paraparaumu.

Richmond is being marketed by tender closing 3 May through Bayleys Wairarapa. Lindsay Watts and Tim Falloon of Bayleys say the property is an outstanding private residence with many potential income streams.

“Given the evolution of the greater Wairarapa area as a tourist destination thanks to its proximity to Wellington and daily flights into Masterton airport, there could be the opportunity to offer accommodation at Richmond in conjunction with garden tours or as a retreat experience,” says Mr Watts.

“It is certainly a property that stands out. The attention to detail in both the empathetically restored homestead and the inspirational gardens sets Richmond apart and it’s an opportunity that rarely comes around.”

The garden was designed not only to be viewed from the house, room by room, and from an upstairs terrace, but also to entice people to walk and explore.

“The current owners were able to realise their vision for Italian-style formal gardens because of the flat site, the availability of water via a bore on the property, and the large area of north-facing land,” explains Mr Falloon.

Formal gardens must be sited on the north face so that hedging grows evenly all around. The garden achieves its harmony and continuity through the repetition of a few predominant species; European beech – copper and green – is used extensively for hedging and forest trees, Hornbeam is hedged and pleached as well as linden limes, which are also used as forest trees. Buxus Sempervirens is used extensively and pulls the garden design together in the form of hedging and topiary.

Each garden room on the south side of the house is unique with whimsical elements designed to surprise.

The property also features an historic barn that predates the house, vegetable gardens and glasshouse, a large swimming pool surrounded by mature trees, original stables half of which have been converted to carports, pony paddock, horse arena and tennis court and a new two-bedroom cottage built in the style of the main residence.

The restoration of the homestead has been exceedingly thorough and was overseen by respected conservation architect Chris Cochran to ensure that all additions and alterations would be in keeping with the era in which the house was built. Amongst the additions is a grand portico which looks north towards the gardens and takes in water features and an impressive bronze fountain which is a reproduction of a fountain in Madrid.

In home design, neutrals are those mild tones that don’t offend — those that easily combine with others or serve as backdrops for other more assertive accent colors.

In the garden, the obvious choice of a neutral color is green. And red is a stunning accent color that shines in front of a backdrop of green foliage.

Start the show in spring with red-flowering tulips. As any kindergartener with a box of crayons knows, tulips are best drawn in red. The intense flame of a red tulip epitomizes the optimism of spring. They are gorgeous combined with cheery yellow daffodils and carpets of blue squill.

Tulipa gregii is a short tulip with purple-streaked foliage. Tulipa fosteriana is a vigorous blooming tulip with large flowers on tall 18-inch stems.

As spring turns to summer, choices for plants with red blossoms abound. Poppies, both annual and perennial varieties, can fill the garden with true, clear red. They are just as lovely dotting a drift of soft pinks and misty lavenders as they are glowing in plantings of white daisies and golden black-eyed Susans.

Allegro, Beauty of Livermore, and Brilliant are among the best red perennial poppies. Adding annual poppies to your garden is as easy as scattering poppy seeds in the bed. They germinate and grow quickly.

Daylilies are one of the easiest perennials to grow, and their contribution to the garden is substantial. Choose varieties with overlapping bloom times and you’ll have red daylilies shining in the border from June to September. Chicago Apache, Scarlet Tanager, and James Marsh are just a few of the many varieties available at local garden centers.

There are plenty of annual flowers that bloom in red — celosia, salvia, petunias, and verbenas are good choices. Red geraniums are another popular option and are readily available. Plant some in empty spots between maturing perennials, as an edging to the border, or in container plantings.

Shady gardens become more inviting with touches of red, too. Astilbes perform beautifully in shaded, moist soils. Try Fanal or Montgomery. Their plume-like flowers are lovely. Cardinal flowers (Lobelia cardinalis) boast spikes of brilliant red. You’ll love them almost as much as the hummingbirds!

Don’t forget annuals when planning touches of red in the shade garden. Impatiens grow into traffic-stopping mounds of color by summer’s end.

The best gardens are not built on annual and perennial plants alone. They need the structure that only woody plants can provide.

Roses contribute some of the strongest reds to the landscape. The low maintenance, trouble-free culture of shrub roses makes them an easy choice to add summer-long red to the garden. The Knock Out and Drift series of roses are both beautiful and easy to care for. Knock Out roses grow 3 to 4 feet tall and wide; Drift roses are smaller reaching 1 to 2 feet tall and 2 to 3 feet wide.

The color red is essential in the fall landscape. Maple leaves glow in shades of red; berries ripen to red. The changing foliage of gro-low sumac and red chokeberry put on a dazzling show.

Perennials offer red in foliage and flowers. The blooms of garden mums star in the fall border. The foliage of some varieties perennial geraniums smolders.

Long after the ruby leaves have fallen from trees and shrubs, red is striking against winter’s snow. Hawthorns and crabapples hold on to their fruit longer than other trees. The stems of red twig dogwood blaze against a blanket of snow. Winterberry holly (Ilex verticillata) boasts flashing red berries after its leaves have fallen.

Use red as an accent color in your landscape and experience a season’s worth of red letter days.

• Diana Stoll is a horticulturist and the garden center manager at The Planter’s Palette, 28W571 Roosevelt Road, Winfield. Call (630) 293-1040 or visit planterspalette.com.