“When yellow dives into the red the ripples are orange.”—Derek Jarman
In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale of 1390 a fox was described as having a “color betwixe yelow and reed”. There was no word in the Old English language for the color orange except for ‘geoluread’ or yellow-red. It wasn’t until the arrival of the orange fruit in Europe that the color got its own name. The Sanskrit word ‘naranga’ for the fruit evolved into ‘orange’ and by the sixteenth century orange referred to both the fruit and the color.
On a morning walk, after a rainy night, the red efts, or newts, were delicately trundling their way through their world. These amazing little creatures are the terrestrial juvenile stage of an an amphibian life and can regenerate lost limbs and live up to fifteen years. And they have a brilliant orange skin with rows of red dots encircled in black which inspired me to celebrate orange in the garden.
I often encounter newts in the garden where I am happy that they consume slugs. Down at their height are nasturtiums blooming, deep orange in ‘Jewel Mix’, and against the variegated foliage of ‘Alaska Mix’, and peachy orange of ‘TipTop Apricot’. Calendulas also come in shades of orange. Bright, pointy petals of ‘Orange Porcupine’, burnt orange of ‘Indian Prince’, ‘Greenheart Orange’ with a center of emerald. The California poppy, Eschscholzia California, has flowers of a uniform golden orange nestled in blue-green foliage. Add some orange to your salad with nasturtium blooms and scattered petals of calendulas.
Emilia coccinea, the tassel flower or Flora’s paintbrush, is an unassuming beauty. From paddle-shaped leaves arises a slender stalk topped by the red-orange blossom. A group of Emilia tossed about by a breeze is a delight to watch. ‘Irish Poet’ is a cultivar with a softer orange tassel that I added to the deep orange this year, and, of course every garden should have an Irish poet in residence.
The native butterfly weed, Asclepias tuberosa, a perennial species of milkweed, is a magnet for monarchs and other pollinators. The clusters of blooms are a bright yellow orange, a perfect complement to the orange and black monarch butterflies. This perennial is drought tolerant and deer don’t eat it, a perfect beneficial plant. A topical species, A.curassavica, is grown as an annual butterfly weed with umbels of clustered red stars surrounded by yellow bits to create an orange mist.
A couple of big plants produce stunning orange blooms. Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ is a cultivar of the genus which is native to South Africa. If planted deeply ‘Lucifer’ is perennial in our climate and sends up four foot sword-like foliage with arching flower stalks with clusters of brilliant red-orange over a month-long period. Tithonia rotindifolia ‘Torch’, the Mexican sunflower, is an annual that grows up to six feet in one season. Multiple branches are each topped by bright, clear orange-petaled blooms with golden centers. One plant makes a big statement. For smaller gardens a variety, ‘Fiesta del Sol’ is half the height with just as much color but loses the towering impact. Years ago, while traveling in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, I saw tithonias growing wild in a yellow-flowered form and there is a cultivar, ‘Yellow Torch’, but the orange is much more spectacular.
Another native to Mexico is Cosmos sulphureus, the hot colored cousin of the pinky C.bipinnatus. The habit of the orange cosmos is rangier and shorter with multiple branches adorned with compact blooms that seem to float in the garden.
Two iconic gardens in England feature the use of orange in different ways. At Sissinghurst Vita Sackville-West filled the cottage garden with masses of flowers in hot shades of red, yellow, and orange, a controlled and successful use of limited color set off by terra cotta orange brick paths and structures. She wrote that it is “a symphony of all the wild sunset colours, a sort of western sky after a stormy day.” At Great Dixter Christopher Lloyd used color to shock and jar the eye. Orange is paired with magenta, chartreuse, and purple. Color was an adventure and the color orange a star. “Of all colours, orange is the one that cries out the loudest for contrast. It is a waste to mingle it with red. Be bold and get it with purple, baby green, blue, even pink.” I love to pair orange and deep purple; both share red as a parent and get along well. But an orange and pink combination is not for me, sorry Christo.
The annual plants will continue to produce orange blooms all summer. The calendulas even survive early frosts and are the source of late bouquets for the windowsill. And late in the gardening season one of my favorite tender salvias begins to bloom. Salvia confertiflora sends up wands with small blooms of rusty red-orange. I grow it in a pot so that I can bring it inside on frosty nights and enjoy the orange blooms with orange sumac foliage as a backdrop. A late celebration of the color orange.
“So don’t pretend that deep yellow or some sort of salmon is orange. Rise to the challenge and go for the real thing.”—Christopher Lloyd
July 2022