Digital Flower Pictures.com: Flat Iron Building

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Foliage on ABC Wednesday

Foliage on ABC Wednesday

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I caught this picture as I was enjoying a brownie and a Grown Up Soda at Wave Hill Gardens in the Bronx. If you have never been to Wave Hill it is in my mind one of the best Public Gardens in the US. It is a small, uncrowded, intimate garden in the Riverdale section. I love the plant collection and the gardeners always come up with something to impress me. The Wild Garden is a cacophony of various bulbs, alpines, perennials and annuals all together in a kind of mashed way. It all works brilliantly somehow and I am always in awe of it.

Foliage is one of the more important aspects of a garden. I love how these were working to together. Most plants only flower for a couple of weeks at the most and for the rest of the time you are looking at the foliage. That why I always try and add some color to my gardens by using colorful foliage. Some of my favorites are (not in order):

Red and Golden Barberry (Berberis)
Dark Leafed Weigela (Weigela ‘Wine and Roses’ and 'Midnight Wine’)
Blue Spruce Cultivars (Picea pungens)
Japanese Maple (Acer palmatum)
Spirea (Spiraea)
Lamb’s Ear (Stachys byzantina)
Coleus (Solenostemon scutellarioides) mouthful, eh?
Hosta (Hosta)
Variegated Pachysandra (Pachysandra terminalis 'Variegata)

Just to name a few. They are the color gift that keeps giving. In this picture I probably would have been afraid to mix these plants together. It turned out wonderful so sometimes it takes a bold stroke to make something happen. You shouldn’t really be afraid of experimenting a little out in the garden. Try and think things through and then try and add a little twist that usually brings excitement and the payoff of having done something creative.

Just for fun here is another ‘F’ I took on Saturday when I was in Manhattan.

The Flat Iron Building

"I found myself agape, admiring a skyscraper, the prow of the Flatiron Building, to be particular, ploughing up through the traffic of Broadway and Fifth Avenue in the late-afternoon light."
H.G. Wells, 1906