French Impressionist painter Claude Monet was also a gardener. The garden he designed at Giverny, a small town outside of Paris, not only boasted the Japanese bridge and pond with water lilies that he painted, but it was the first one that featured a floral allee flanked with floral berms. In the flower beds surrounding the allee, Monet took great care with color combinations and placement.
A couple of the color combinations Monet favored, red-green-silver and red-pink-silver, connote “winter holidays” and are especially easy to recreate in the fall and winter native garden because silver-gray is such a prominent color among garden-worthy native plants.
Hollywood got its name from the toyon-covered hills that, with profuse bright red berries in the fall and winter, reminded early Los Angelenos of holly berries. Toyon is just as successful in northern California in sun or light shade, with good drainage. Depending on the soil, sun, water, and genetics, it can be from 8 to 15 ft. tall and wide.
Gawky in its adolescence, toyon can be shaped into a loose screen, multitrunked small tree, specimen shrub, or espalier against a wall or fence. It accepts light pruning but can be damaged by major cuts. Like many members of the rose family, toyon is susceptible to fungal diseases if it's crowded or allowed to get too dense. Birds love the berries later in the season.
To complement the red and green of the toyon, try silver-leaved purple sage or California sagebrush, tall spikes of white sage, or low-growing coast buckwheat in the foreground.
Other red accents for the winter landscape include redtwig dogwood, a 15-ft. shrub for moister areas whose red stems are especially showy after the burst of fall color ends; red elderberry, with red berries; or the bright red rosehips that remain after California wild rose bushes have finished blooming.
Different cultivars of hummingbird fuchsia, which bloom from late summer until frost with red to red-orange flowers, offer green to silver foliage. For a muted palette, several native buckwheats, with green-gray to silver-white foliage, have flowers that age from white or pink to red-brown. Lipstick-red flowers can appear on island bush snapdragon year-round, though they are most abundant from late winter to spring.
Often blooming before the end of the year with profuse red flowers, fuchsia-flowered gooseberry pairs well with silvery California sagebrush or Canyon Silver island snowflake.
For a year-round focal point of red-green-silver, choose a manzanita with red stems or trunks, or red-tipped new leaves, and plant it with silvery native sages or buckwheats. As early as September, some manzanitas start producing tiny pink or white flowers, followed by small red fruits. In a small area, you can plant green- and silver-leaved yarrows in a red ceramic pot.
For a red-pink-silver combination, the most stunning midwinter sight is a group of pink-flowering currants with flower colors in shades from silver pink to carmine red, raindrops reflecting silvery highlights, and silver-leaved shrubs in the foreground. By selecting different currant cultivars, you can be assured of a range of colors. The currants can be grown in narrow areas, such as side yards, where you can enjoy their winter color from a window on rainy days.
© 2009 Tanya Kucak