Support our national sports teams by planting up a green and gold garden.
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With South Africans sporting green and gold colours in support of all our national teams, there is no better time than now to create a beautiful and interesting garden using these very colours!
Go for gold
Gold is suitable in any garden, adding a luminous quality and lightening dark places. Gold can dazzle with its boldness, or add softness when muted. Combining it with other coloured plants can have a dazzling effect in the garden.
At this time of year, the golden coloured flowers of Namaqualand daisy, nemesia, gazania, arctotis and pansy warm the garden. Shrubs with yellow flowers include euryops daisy, Tecoma capensis, phygelius and mahonia.
Shrubs with gold, or variegated gold-and-green, foliage are useful provided they are used in moderation. Look for Abelia 'Francis Mason', Coleonema 'Sunset Gold', Coprosma 'Green & Gold' and Coprosma 'Taupata Gold', Duranta 'Sheena's Gold' and Duranta 'Goldmine', Euonymus 'Microphyllus Gold Dust', Melaleuca 'Revolution Gold', New Zealand flaxes and Rosmarinus 'Wilma's Gold'.
Conifers are useful windbreaks in cold gardens. Those with gold foliage include 'Gold Crest', 'Golden Rocket', 'Swane's Gold' and 'Rheingold'. Carolina jasmine(Gelsemium sempervirens) is a hardy climber (3m x 3m) suitable for a trellis, with small, glossy green leaves and yellow trumpet-shaped flowers in winter and spring.
The gold form of creeping Jenny (Lysimachia aurea) makes an attractive ground cover, and Acorus 'Golden Edge', Festuca 'Golden Toupee' and Carex 'Evergold' are dwarf ornamental grasses.
The glory of green
Green brings welcome shade on hot days in today's smaller gardens where there is no room for large trees. Deep green appears to recede and so increases distance, but need not only be restricted to the background, as it is also useful for creating focal points in the garden. When darker shades are combined with lighter shades of green they create patterns of light and shadow.
Green foliage plants can be used to soften an informal design or strengthen a formal layout. It is the use of clipped evergreens in a formal garden that gives it the orderly and disciplined appearance that is its hallmark.
Placing green flowers in a garden is no different to using other colours. Grow them among foliage that complements or contrasts with them in texture and shape, use in an all-green planting or combined with gold flowers and foliage.
Life is a garden in spring when there are dainty green-flowered hellebores for shady places, and the green-flushed-pink blossoms of the flowering cherry Prunus 'Ukon'. Clematis florida var. flore pleno (alba-plena) has double pale green flowers ageing to white.
Most gardeners know and grow the white lace flower, but more unusual is Ammi 'Green Mist' with greenish-white flower heads. A number of day lilies have green throats, and roses with 'greenish' flowers include miniature 'Green Ice' with open white blooms that age to a pale green, 'Greensleeves', a floribunda with green and pale pink flowers, and yellow-green scented 'Irish Luck'.
Of indigenous plants, none is more spectacular than the green arum Zantedeschia 'Green Goddess' with its sculptural green spathes, or more unusual than the chartreuse green bracts of Protea scolymocephala. Kniphofia rigidifolia has lime-green and burnt red flowers, Galtonia viridiflora, a native of mountainous damp places, has pendant green bells, and Eucomis humilis bears green flowers with the distinctive pineapple topknot of the species.
By Joan Wright
