My Last Damn Rant About Red

06-17-09 –This spring I spent two months feverishly working on my house to get it ready for sale (it hasn’t), spent a day in the emergency room with a hand injury (I’m fine), showed up on time, mostly, for dozens of landscape consultations (and nabbed a good number of great jobs, my theory about the dire economy further below), all while blasting off five articles for two new publications that apparently didn’t check my credentials, or did, and hired me as a garden writer anyway.

So I’m feeling tired, enthused, worried, relieved, pained and pumped, and when I write in this rarified state, I have to warn you, I’m tough on beginners.

New gardeners, red is a dastardly, mischievous, Gordian knot of a color that beginning gardeners latch onto with the temerity they would grasp a potion granting eternal life. Or at the very least, a cream that actually does erase wrinkles around the eyes. Eureka! I have found the secret to creating beautiful garden beds and flower containers: Douse my yard with RED!

Repeat after me: Red is not a desirable, useful flower color for the garden. Reddish foliages, hell yes, but when choosing bloom colors, plant a hair more than a little red and red becomes a thief, a lout, a boor, a drunken, obnoxious party guest that doesn’t leave until 2:30 a.m. after the booze runs out. Red is for rubes.

Colorful? Well, yes, in a rather drunken, boorish way. Beautiful? Hardly.

Oh, red is definitely seductive. A woman doesn’t head out on the town in red lipstick and a little red dress hoping for an evening of coffee-laced conversation with a vested college engineering professor, and a guy doesn’t drive a red Corvette or Ferrari for the wonderful gas mileage. Red gets you noticed.

Red blooms will certainly get noticed in the garden (during daylight, anyway), but here, too much red is like too much chocolate cake, too much vodka, too much Midwestern seafood: Go over the edge, you puke.

Red is the strongest color there is in terms of, well, I don’t know the exact scientific equation, but call it density. Red is so densely colorful, so loud and commanding, that it sucks the color out of everything near it. I once saw a large landscape, new home construction, which had been sculpted with a magnificent array of small trees, dwarf conifers, myriad shrubs, unique sculptures, and artistic stone outcroppings. All this work was done in the fall. The perennials were planted the next spring, in small clusters here and there, filling some gaps.

A lot of Russian Sage (Perovskia) was popped in along the borders, and it was bare-root, so when planted was little more than clusters of short, gray sticks. You weren’t going to see the silvery green foliage for at least a month, or the rich blue blooms until midsummer.

The homeowners couldn’t wait. All along the front edge of the large, deep, sweeping beds they planted red annuals, a lot of red salvia and red dahlias, piping hot and bloom-filled from the spring greenhouses. And from two blocks away, fifty feet away, or standing at the edge of the landscape, all you saw was this red line of blooms in front. Six figures of landscaping that included just about every plant form, foliage color and texture contrast that could be created virtually disappeared. I didn’t have my camera, and don’t believe I would have had the strength to shoot a picture if I had.

The first color you see when you pull up to the nursery.

You can’t use red in any quantity in the front of the bed. It banishes the colors behind it. You can’t use great quantities of red in the middle or along the back of the bed, it sucks the color out of the blooms in front. Red is tricky. And it’s the only color that is, except perhaps for orange, but don’t get me started. So guess what color is most overused by new gardeners? The tricky one: red.

It’s not close to being your fault, beginners. The nursery industry is taking advantage of your naiveté. They ram the red plants to the front of the lot where they are the first things you see as you park and walk up. It’s spring, the world around you is brown and boring, you are craving intense color, so the nurseries gleefully grant you a lethal dose. And nowhere is this more horrifically evident than in the sale of the most aesthetically toxic plant on the planet, the red geranium.

The great tragedy is that once ensnared by the red geranium’s satanic grasp, it often becomes a lifelong affliction.

I’ve told this tale on the site before, I’ll keep it brief, there is a wonderful independent nursery outside of Cedarburg, Wisconsin, run by a woman who knows her stuff and who grows the most fabulous annuals from seed. Linum, Gaura, Amaranthus, Lavatera, Iberus, Lisianthus, Salpiglossus, all the cool stuff one would never find at the Home Depot, or even most standard nurseries.

The nursery is out in the country, at the dead end of a quarter-mile gravel road. Back up at the highway, at the start of this gravel road, is a large, carved and painted wood sign with the name of the nursery. On the day I visited, the proprietor had apparently tired of the customers who pull up to her penned yard only to have their quarter-mile, dust-clogged journey end in disappointment, for next to this ornate nursery sign was a second sign, hand-lettered on cardboard, reading, “We do NOT sell red geraniums!”

The worst of the worst: A commercial installation, a bed of red geraniums fronted by a bed of Stella de Oro daylilies. Lord, give me strength.

This gardener must already own the plastic, fake terra cotta pot, it’s the only thing missing. About a twenty-incher, I reckon

You either get that story or you don’t.

Red geraniums are a beginner’s plant, like daylilies, and purchasing five or ten or twenty red geraniums, then planting them in containers and flower boxes and in little circles around your mailbox is an activity you will think about at some point in the distant future and chuckle over. You can shoot me all the e-mails you like about how wrong I am and how much you adore red geraniums, the important e-mail is the one you’ll send me in ten or fifteen years.

The salmon and other pink-having-sex-with-red geraniums that the nursery geeks have concocted in their high-tech botanical brothels offer some relief, certainly, but dressing your landscape with an overabundance of off-red geraniums is hardly a cure for what ails you and your yard. Too much salmon is still, well, too much salmon. If you’re hot for red and its kin, I guarantee you are not using enough white in your gardens, not enough deep yellow, and when they stick something blue in with the red, people think they’re designing.

Next time you do a multiple-plant container of annuals, try it with blooms of pale pink and yellow and blue. Or white, yellow and blue. If you’re only sticking one blooming plant in a small pot, try a white geranium. In any case, notice how the container comes alive after suppertime, and how beacon-like it becomes as evening descends. Focusing in again on the importance of white, day or night, white blooms in the garden draw one’s attention more than red, while reveling in all the colors nearby, and white positively glows in evening. Yet white is the only color not found on those useless color wheels included in every beginner’s first garden design book. It’s rigged, I tell ya.

The strip mall actually pays a company for this.	One of those useless color wheels. Note the absence of the color white.

Yes, dark blue also disappears in evening, but light blue doesn’t. On summer evenings, that period of three to four hours when you and your neighbors probably view your garden most, the colors white, silver, pale blue, yellow, pale pink and light green remain highly visible, while plants with red blooms, geraniums or otherwise, turn dim, then stern, then ugly, then disappear, a sort of satanic, reverse-vampire of a color that scampers from moonlight.

Too much red creates a jarring mess of a landscape. Use it sparingly.

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