Easy Gardener • Pat Howell
	Something joyous: Gardening books for the color-courageous

I'm not going to dwell on the recent offerings from Mother Nature. Everyone struggled. Some struggled a great deal.

Let's talk about something joyous. A joyous book, for example.

There are many garden books, some of which (a very few) are truly worth their price. (For the very avid gardener, a good garden book does not even have to have any pictures.)

The rest are rated in a variety of ways: quality and number of pictures; plant zone information (will it live through the winter?); an index–most particularly, an accurate index–thoroughness of the subject matter; references; bibliography; truly helpful lists; excellent ideas for plant combinations; and correct plant names (Latin and common). Many books are out of style before they hit the stores, frequently because garden photography gets better every year (or month).

Further, ideas about garden composition change rapidly: Lush is In; who wants to see weeds springing up in bare earth? Earth could just as easily have layers of plants that crowd out the weeds before they gain a foothold. Yet many not-so-old garden books show plenty of bare earth between plants, but nary a weed. Who is tending these gardens?

There are a small handful of respectable books on color in the garden: Color in Your Garden by Penelope Hobhouse (not an easy read, but fascinating) and Gertrude Jekyll's Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden, first published in 1908 (!), come to mind.

If you have a garden, want a garden, used to have a garden, garden only in containers, or have a friend starting to garden, you will enjoy The Gardener's Palette: Creating Color in the Garden, by Sydney Eddison and photographs (excellent!) by Steve Silk.

Eddison is the author of five books on gardening and writes regularly for Fine Gardening and The Gardener (a Royal Horticulture Society publication). She lives in Connecticut, and teaches at the prestigious New York Botan-ical Garden and the Institute of Ecosystems Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. Her background as a painter and scene designer has given her insight into the dramatic role of color in the garden.

The foreword for Sydney's book is written by Pamela Harper, local gardener (Seaford, Va.) and author of Time-Tested Plants: Thirty Years in a Four-Season Garden; and Perennials: How to Select, Grow, and Enjoy. Harper writes: "Sydney makes lucid the arcane language of color."

The Gardener's Palette is about learning to look. It encourages exploration and experimentation: for example, the important role of grays. (Van Gogh wrote of "the endless variety of grays: red-gray, yellow-gray, blue-gray, green-gray, orange-gray and violet-gray.") Looking around, you will begin to see them. Walls, walks, patios, ornaments, and, of course, plants. Grays go with every hue. Next to gray, bright colors remain characteristically vivid and pastels glow.

Gray also plays an indispensable role in all white gardens. In the most famous, at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, England, a memorable weeping pear with silver leaves presides over one end of a crosswalk. Along the walk, silver-gray lamb's ears and various pale-gray arte-misias tumble onto the darker gray flagstones.

Once aware of the serenity evoked by gentle pinks, blues, and lavenders versus the exuberance of "hot" scarlet, orange, and warm yellows, gardeners usually prefer one or the other (or both, but in different locations). Yet such preferences need not limit the colors used. Vivid scarlets, oranges and warm yellows become mellow when reduced to pastels. And a single dab of complementary red makes vibrant an otherwise peaceful green scene.

Eddison's book carries us along dizzyingly with her masterful phrasing and Silk's color-saturated photographs. This book is a balm for long snowy winter days. Put it on your holiday gift list/wish list. (Do sit down with your magnifying glass, however, for the print of the legend under each picture is a bit small for maturing eyes.)

Many different aspects of color are discussed by Sydney in bite sized, digestible chapters that include such subjects as: the preeminence of green; the diversity of whites; why subtle color associations are often best appreciated in containers; and how–given sufficient space–such unsympathetic adjacent pairs as crimson and scarlet can be rendered compatible in incremental progressions.

Nothing is overlooked, from how colors are influenced by time of day and season of the year to the effect of regional surroundings and the role of texture, size, and shape of the flower.

In the foreword, Harper writes: "The color-cowardly will be helped and heartened by this unique book. Even experienced gardeners, artists and the color-courageous, who prefer to work things out by eye and instinct, will find abundant tips and suggestions for unusual garden and container combinations."

Easy Gardener is among the color-courageous. Her motto is: "A good clash is better than a bad match."

Pat Howell is a Takoma Park gardener and landscape designer/garden-builder, and welcomes comments, advice, suggestions, complaints. She is available for hand-holding and answering questions through Deephaven Landscapers.