Midseason Lineup Change

While watching all of the annuals arrive at the garden center this spring, I kept thinking about my dark black urn. Last year it was a gift of sorts for my boyfriend--the modern man and abstract painter who still maintains a deep love of classical architecture and landscape elements. This year, I wanted to place the urn next to the side door and fill it with deep, rich colors to add some interest to that beige-door-on-beige-siding entrance.

I knew that I wanted to use 'Black Knight,' one of the dwarf cannas that Brian had bought me at the home and garden show, as the "thriller" element in the pot. And I love 'Silver Falls' dichondra so much that I wanted to use that as the "spiller." But it's a big pot, so I obviously needed a few "fillers" as well. After much debate, I settled on a combination of the rose-and-gold 'Royal Glissade' coleus, bronze carex flagellifera, and the lovely green-and purple 'Gage's Shadow' perilla.

This first picture shows the pot soon after the initial planting. That's not actually 'Black Knight' in the back, however. As per Murphy's Law of Gardening #3456, the only dud out of the 5 canna tubers that I planted was the one for which I had plans... so another dwarf canna with colorful foliage, 'Ingeborg,' was tapped instead.

A few weeks after planting, I noticed that 'Royal Glissade' was staying rather rosy instead of developing some of the pineapple-yellow streaks that I had counted on. So to lighten up the middle of the pot, I tucked in a tall curry plant. (The taller variety is a greenish silver, unlike the whiter silver of the dwarf curry, so it didn't detract from the dichondra.)

That was better, but... well, but still not good enough. I couldn't help but feel that the pot was just one more plant away from being a full, lush knockout. So last week I asked the designer who creates our custom plant arrangements at the garden center for his opinion. I explained that the bare canna stem was bothering me a bit and I wondered what might round out the arrangement.

He suggested I add some golden creeping jenny for a little pizzaz. I had used up my at-home supply of lysimachia nummularia 'aurea' and we had just put our 4 inch annual pots on sale, so I bought one before I left that day. I brought the pot home and plopped it right down on top of the dichondra while I went inside to rinse out my coffee mug.

When I came back outside, I discovered that Danny was absolutely right about how the creeping jenny would wake up the whole combination. In fact, I liked the creeping jenny there so much that I promptly evicted the dichondra and placed the creeping jenny front and center. I threaded the longest stems back through the center of the pot to give them a head start on filling in the canna area--and I may get two more tall curry plants to flank the canna stem, too, since herbs are so cheap.

Between the creeping jenny and the alchemilla mollis, I think that acid-bright is my color theme of the summer... but that doesn't mean I have completely fallen out of love with the 'Silver Falls' dichondra. After hearing of the use of kidneyweed as a groundcover in more temperate areas, I decided to plant it in the front garden. If it takes off and starts to fill in around the purple sage, bergenia, heucheras, and grasses as nicely as I imagine it will in my mind's eye, then I won't feel nearly so bad about its "demotion" from the urn pot!