Working with the color pink in the garden can be a greatest pleasure, but also a major challenge. The botanical world is filled with many different values of pink portrayed in both flowers and foliage, and quite often, pinks of various hues fail to harmonize.

Sydney Eddison, author of The Gardener's Palette: Exploring Color in the Garden (Contemporary Books, 2002) and Gardens to Go: Creating and Designing a Container Garden (Bulfinch Press, 2005) has developed the Gardener's Color Wheel. With this tool, she explains why shell pink can be difficult to match. Since the shell pink shade has yellow in it rather than blue, pairing it with a bluish pink can stifle both colors. Shell pink tends to work best with greens, which is why a green container can be the best solution when working with that hue.

Using her "no fail" method of combining plants in a container, Sydney balances shell pink "thrillers" - or upright plants, with "fillers" -which are plants that act as weavers, and pink "spillers" -that cascade down. Selecting different pink bloomers and foliage plants, she complements them against chartreuse-leaved companions such as Helichrysum petiolare ‘Limelight' and Lamium ‘Golden Anniversary'.

Some shell pink performers that Sydney finds pleasing include:

Impatiens cultivars
Dahlia ‘Gallery Pablo'
Lantana ‘Anne Marie'
Heuchera ‘Plum Pudding'
Abutilon cultivars
Ipomoea ‘Pink Frost'
Diascia cultivars
Coleus
Cosmos cultivars
Begonia x hiemalis cultivars

Special thanks:
Sydney Eddison

The Color Wheel Company
P. O. Box 130
Philomath, OR 97370-0130
541- 929-7585
www.thegardenerscolorwheel.com

Hollandia Nursery
Bethel, CT
www.ctgrown.com

Campo de' Fiori
www.campodefiori.com

Chintz-N-Prints of Newtown