There are certain things we do for every new book. Sending out review copies to sales people and the media is one of these. But every so often we really want a book to make a splash and try to do something unique.

Tom Fischer is very special to us. He is our editor-in-chief, our resident foodie who eats at least once from every new food cart, and—as of today—one of our spring authors. His newest book, The Gardener’s Color Palette, releases today. And we obviously had to do something special for it.

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Portland in January can be pretty drab and dreary. The grey of the bare branches matches the grey of the ever present clouds, which match the grey of the pavement (often muddied and puddled by the grey rain). Even the numerous conifers take on a charcoal cast. With spring (and color!) several months out, I was ecstatic to receive an advance copy of Tom Fischer’s The Gardener’s Color Palette.

Every chapter represents a specific color (or color range), and each page profiles a different bright flower popping off the page. In these dreary Portland weeks it makes me think that maybe spring isn’t too far away.

Though I’ve always considered myself to be a green and yellow type of gal (both are represented in the book), I find myself constantly pulled back to the chapter on orange. There’s something about the soft peach of the Tulipa ‘Dordogne’ and the brighter tropical orange of the Fritillaria imperialis that makes me wonder how I can incorporate them into my garden this spring (or fall as is the case with planting tulip bulbs).

Fritillaria imperialis

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Keeyla Meadows’ book, Fearless Color Gardens, just started shipping out from our warehouses this week. This is a book that pops out of your bookshelf — as the title suggests, it is about color, and a wild, bursting, brilliant cacophony of color, too.

I have been thinking about color lately, as we enter a season that, for many people, is made up of muted colors. You are left with form: seedheads, the branches of trees, and the silhouettes of dead vegetables (if you’re like me and took a casual approach to end-of-season cleanup.) Sometimes it feels like the only color is the scarf around your neck. If you find yourself taking your scarves outside to drape over the garden for relief from the grey — give your dry-cleaning bill a break, and look through Keeyla’s book instead.

I was a bit taken aback by the book at first. It is so VERY colorful! There are sculptures, striking and startling plant combinations, painted benches, and a strong sense of  how much Keeyla loves color, and how much she wants other people to love color too. She includes color exercises – painting pots, working with her color triangle, and planting color themed gardens. The book is playful, whimsical, welcoming, and giddy with color. Some of the gardens are just the sort of thing a Dr. Seuss character would plant. (The Cat in the Hat, maybe?)

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I’ve been reading parts of Fearless Color Gardens by Keeyla Meadows today, deciding how to capture the essence of it in a one-page letter. It really isn’t going to be easy; there is a lot of fun, friendly information packed into this 180-page book.

The parts I like best are the TRY THIS sections. These are step-by-step plans that help gardeners connect with color. Most of them are simple, and they’re all fun. Here’s an example  from chapter one.

TRY THIS: Keep a Color Adventure Journal

Keep a color notebook to record your discoveries on your color journey. I use sketch notebooks from the art store. Select several colored crayons, pens, chalks, or pencils that you are attracted to. One of the wonders of color is how personal it is. What attracts you is repulsive to someone else. We are not all the same. Now select a few colors that are repellent to you. All explorations are of interest regarding color.

Here are some explorations to try:

#1. Find a flower with petals of a color that is very attractive to you. Copy the color into your notebook. Write about the color. Do this for a few colors. What are some of the most attracting colors for you?

#2. Select one or two colored pens, pencils, or crayons of colors that are familiar from your childhood. Choose at least one color that you love or used to love and one color that you dislike. Make dots, squiggles, giggles of each color on a page, leaving room to write. Write about your color roots.

#3. Perhaps draw a stepping-stone, “follow the yellow brick road” path with one of your colors. Trace your relationship with the color you love through the years. then trace your relationship with a color you dislike or are repelled by.

From Fearless Color Gardens, available in December

Fall is a contradictory season. On the one hand, leaves are dying off and falling, the summer sunshine and warmth are retreating, daylight hours are dwindling. My neighbors’ yards do not look particularly handsome these days; rather, they have a droopy and soggy quality about them, and most of the colorful blooms have gone away. But on the other hand, it seems that the world has never felt so beautiful. The air is sharp and fresh, and the rain has rarely smelled so comforting.

I’m realizing that autumn brings with it a paradigm shift from “individual” to “corporate” beauty. Color is found not in what we tend delicately with our hands, but in larger, wilder things: trees, wind, furious flurries of dead leaves, sunsets, and paint-by-number hillsides rising behind the city. My neighborhood as a whole screams, “Fall is here,” as it is collectively covered in a frosting of orange and yellow and red. The season is like a Monet painting: we have to let go and step back to see how all the small pieces of apparent chaos are actually vibrant paint smears on the glorious canvas of fall.

On a personal level, this season seems to be mirroring my life in a state of transition. I’ve just completed the process of moving from one side of the Willamette River to the other. Last week, boxes were scattered across the house, countless amounts of telephone calls were made to utility companies, maintenance people, rental agents, and house painters.  But in spite of all the bedlam, that transition carried with it a wonderful promise of things to come. Now, as my life is settling down slightly, nothing seems more perfect than curling up in our rocking chair on our new front porch with a mug of hot apple cider, watching the season complete its own untidy shift into a new phase of life.

And who doesn’t love hot chocolate or spiced apple cider? Finding an orange leaf that somehow managed to sneak into the hood of my coat? Or the sight of cats lounging on top of cars, absorbing the last remnants of engine heat.

The transition from one way of life to another, however fleeting it might be, deserves a round of applause. Congratulations, world! You’ve done it again!  And this time, more beautifully than ever.

I usually check Garden Rant when I get back into the office after a weekend. (You have to keep tabs on what those ranting folks are up to – if you don’t you might miss the latest gardening dust-up.)

Scrolling down the page a bit, I saw the post on sculpture in the North Carolina Botanical Garden. I’ve been thinking about art in the garden a lot lately, partly as a result of trying to niceify my own back yard. I currently have very little to show in the “garden art” department. There’s my ceramic fish plaque, which hangs over my composting bins and which makes an excellent Patron Saint of Stuff Rotting.

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The only appropriate thing to do after mourning the demise of summer is to get down to business on all those garden chores that I’ve been putting off for so long, and start thinking about fall.

I harvested and ripped out the last of my godzilla beans, which were menacing the leeks anyway. Here the vanquished monster trails some vines over the edge of my yard debris bucket.

I finally trimmed the edges of my raised beds,  finding lots of spiders, slugs, and a few pill bugs rolling for their lives. I left everyone alive except for the slugs. (It’s a preemptive strike in the ongoing “Slug Wars: A New Hope for a Slug-Free Garden.” Tune in next spring for “Slug Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.” ) Incidentally, my lettuces are adoring the cool weather.

I also decided that the dill seedheads were just too pretty to trim, and left them be. Maybe some birds will enjoy some fresh dill-y breath on their way to Acapulco.

After the maintenance was done, I took some pictures of the spectacular tree growing in front of my house. I think it is a beech, though the bark doesn’t look quite right. In any case, it is spectacular and amazing, and will only get more so from here until all its bright, bright leaves are blown away.

I’ve been having a little trouble fully embracing fall, which arrived all of a sudden at the end of September.  (So suddenly! One day it was sunny and warm and then BAM! Rain and cold!) I feel like there are so many more summer things that I want to do, but time marches on. The only solution is to buck up and get ready for fall – the colors, the pumpkins, the kids asking for candy, my husband eating all the candy and then making me answer the door … (“Here are some great carrots! Please don’t throw eggs at me!”)

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Check out this Halloween display featuring Black Plants, Ghoulish Goodies (Storey Publishing), and Wicked Plants (Algonquin) at The Missouri Botanical Garden. Who knew plants (and cupcakes) could be so scary?

I’m a relative newcomer to the world of garden blogging, and I sometimes come across blog topics that are a whole new world of gardening that I never thought of. The concept of “bloom day” was just such a topic. “What’s this ‘bloom day’?” I thought to myself. “It looks like pictures of people’s flowers. Surely it can’t be that simple? There must be some larger purpose.”

After much curious browsing of the internet, I think I’ve discovered three things.
1) There is no larger purpose that I can see – and really, it doesn’t matter.
2) Flowers are pretty.
3) Bloom Day appears to occur between the 14th and the 16th of every month. Ideally the 15th, but you know — some people get excited, and some people get late.

So, in honor of Bloom Day, finding useful information on the internet, and the release of our new book on black plants, I am posting some images of black flowers. I believe that technically, these flowers should be growing in my own garden, so I’ve picked ones that I would like to have in my garden, given half a chance. I am also posting a day late – but I’m hoping that no-one will refuse to look at flowers just because they are posted on the 16th instead of the 15th.

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