From AwayToGarden.com and RobinhoodRadio.com, this is AwayToGarden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. How confident are you about the use of color in your garden and where do you draw your inspiration from for creating a pleasing palette? The topic of color is just one of many that Stephen Orr tackles in his new book The Gardener's Mindset. And he's here today to talk about how he's finding his way to some combinations that please him through his own garden experiments. So more in a moment but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by color blends wholesale flower bulbs. A third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web colorblends.com and by high mowing seeds WALKUP Vermont Professional Quality Vegetable Flower and herbal seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, highmoingseeds.com and by Whiteflower Farm offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, whiteflower farm.com. Stephen Orr, the former editor-in-chief of Better Homes and Gardens, is embarking on the fifth growing season at the home he shares with his husband on Cape Cod. It's their fourth garden and their most ambitious one, a place that presented new realities to acclimate to, like sandy soil, but also at least one form of great relief, finally no deer. His new book is the gardener's mindset connecting with nature through plants, and I'm glad to him to the program today. Hi Steven how are you? I'm Margaret how are you? I'm great. Is it spring spring up there? It's spring finally spring and it feels like spring so that's wonderful. Well be that's great. So before we get started I'll say we'll have a giveaway of your new book. The gardener's mindset with the transcript of the show over on AwayToGarden.com.

And I've been enjoying it and we did a fun New York Times Garden column together recently.

Got to kind of know the book through doing that.

The opening sentence of the book, The Gardener's Mindset made me laugh out loud, Sam laughing

again now.

It says, My Garden exists most lead deep within my brain.

So his plan stuff has really made it mark on you, huh? Yeah. It got in there. Well, I think I'm just always imagining what I want to curve in the garden. And so I think, you know, I do sometimes feel like people come visit and they're more disappointed than I think, not disappointed, but you know, you realize sometimes people don't see what you see. And I just have so many visions of what, I mean, gardening for me is very much an active faith, as we all know. You're doing something, knowing that you'll be back. You're going to be here when it occurs, right? You're planting a bulb and you are expecting to be in the same place next spring when the bulb comes up, you know, and and so I think everything we're doing whether we're sewing some seeds or planting some trees is an act of faith in the future that we're going to be here to see it and appreciate it. And so I just love that part of gardening. I think that's what I mean by that being mostly in my brain is the planning and the creative wheels turning, especially in the off season of winter, really is what excites me a lot. The reality is definitely do, but as my husband would tell you, I'm really great at planting a bunch of stuff. Maintenance, not as much. Well, join the club, okay. So then tell us about the gardener's mindset because maybe that's a different thing slightly. The title of the book, the gardener's mindset. Is that kind of being in the moment? Is that because I feel like when I'm out there, I'm only there. Like I'm not distracted. When I'm in the house working, I want to think of a thousand other things to do. Exactly. That's exactly the way I feel. I do feel like, you know, I used to do yoga more than I do now. I hurt my back and yoga. You know, they say don't be competitive, but I did try to bend too far. And so, but it reminds me of yoga in that when you're doing yoga, what makes it a meditation even aside from Shavasana the final pose is that you're moving so much you're not able to think of anything else except for the actions of your body and you're moving. I feel like gardening to me is very much that same thing where I enjoy all the different things I need to be doing each day. I try not to let them stress me out. I try to

enjoy them. And as you know, when you walk from one test to another, you see 50 other tests that you want to do or that need to be done. So there is that kind of ADD quality as well. You know, I'm trying to like make sure I don't get distracted and stay focused. But even that, I think is a really nice mindset idea of my goal this morning was to get this new mulch onto these beds and plant these seeds that need to go in at this time of year, anything else I walk by can wait. You see what I'm saying? So it's kind of an immediacy, a being present, but also staying focused. Otherwise, everything you walk by will need some attention and you'll be distracted. Right. Right. Yeah. Oh, I totally agree. And it's good that earlier on, I was not able to make myself just do the chore that I had assigned myself for the day. And I would just run around like a crazy person and never really finish anything. And it's very important, I think, to because it's so satisfying visually, also, just when we get that visual reward when we've actually completed something. We're from start to finish. And I think that's the practical side. The more spiritual side would be being outside in nature. One of my main points with the book was to encourage people to garden so that they're more connected to nature. Especially, as our world becomes more meta and literally in figurative meta governed by big tech companies, AI. All the things coming at us all the time that are trying to gain our attention and market to us all the time and sell us things. I do think gardening is an act of rebellion against that. You know, we all want to shop and I want to buy plants, but I want to buy from the mom and pop nursery. I don't want to have to buy everything from a huge retailer. And so I think gardening is a great way to kind of unplug and almost resist the pull of technology and marketing that were in a day. So this is a book of essays. The Gardner's mindset is a book of essays and you say it's kind of an homage to books of essays that helped form you as a gardener and by the way, of course, when I read it, I was like, I've got that on myself. I've got that on myself. I. I've got that on my shelf. It was like, we were reading the same books

and I think whatever vintage the different ones are, there is relevant when they were written as they are, when you and I read them as they are today, as they, they're just these great SAS. So just tell us a couple of people might not note some of them or haven't read them. any favorite sort of greatest heads that shouldn't be missed, do you think?

Well, I do think there's some classics like Vita Sackville West who wrote for the newspaper, her garden at Sissinghurst that she created with her husband. And so I do think I come to Vita's essays a lot because they have a lot to do with taste and her ideas of what should happen and things that she loves, you know, and knowing her background as, you know, a very flamboyant Bohemian person, aristocratic person as well. You know, you just kind of see things through a different lens than I would coming from a medium-sized town in West Texas. So hearing someone from that era speak is great, you know, other people who wrote essay books or books with a lot of words like Gertrude G. Coli, I think you and I discussed not the best, most interesting writer kind of writes about plants in a very dry way. Other people that stand out to me are Henry Mitchell who was columnist for the Washington Post. Double check. And he's very opinionated. I think Mirabelle Osler, her book, Agental Plea for Chaos, which really gave me the idea that you can be messier and let nature take a hand in your gardening. You don't have to be so suburban and tidy. Yes. There's just so many of them. And some of them are particular to certain types of gardening like herb gardening. But I think the main thing I like is anyone who's expressing an opinion that is from their own personal experience, you know, we all turn to that now, but we call it Reddit. You know, people get stuff on Reddit, which is just a bunch of people's personal opinions about a topic. These are well written essays by people who knew things in the past four to 100 years. Right, and they were all, they would have all been qualified to write a encyclopedia of gardening, but they chose not to. They chose to express it in that essay that from the heart and the mind. You know, you don't even mean format, right?

It was teaching, but it was also inspiration and emotion and a lot of other things. And they needed more how-to books then because they didn't have the internet. Now we have, you know, YouTube and everything you can find. Any specific test you can find. Right. And so the kind of book that maybe I should have, you know, that maybe I was reading when I was starting to be a gardener in the 90s with a rooftop in Manhattan. That's where I really started picking up these books, even though what they were writing about was not that applicable to a rooftop, a fourth. But I could extrapolate what they were saying and I could grow old roses because of the way Vita described, you know, what's the one that she likes so much? Is French name, cuis, the name, a mu or something, which is blushing nymphs thigh was one of her favorite roses. Oh, well. If you know Vita is an interesting rose choice for her. Well, I see. Okay. We'll move on from there. Part of my French. Yes, that's fine. And so one of the topics that some of these books covered, probably all of them at one time or another covered, was color. And that's what you and I talked about when we did the Times Gardening column recently. And you share some advice. You share in the books some advice, you have for using it and finding your way with it. And in the book you say something, also that may be laugh, you said there are no bad colors, just colors used badly, but you said that not in the voice of a critic of other people, but as a perpetrator of some combinations that you felt didn't work very well in your various gardens and someone who has strive and continues to strive to become more confident with combining colors in the garden, yes? Yes, and you know, you and I had a whole talk a week or two ago and since then I've had another unfortunate bulb explosion with my daffodils hitting it up against this time candy-colored sense. So the backyard looks like Peter rabbits, you know, menagerie. Menagerie or some sort of children's book from the 20s. And you know, that can be good or bad if that's what you're after. It's just not what I was after. So right. And so if people don't know what you were, we were referring to is that thing in mind. And then the time and Chad and I already talked about ways to kind of move some stuff around to fix it. But, you know, I'm not trying to be perfectionist with color or wag my finger at people. And when I say no bad colors, just bad colors used badly. I'd probably amend that to say colors used with, you know, in an unconscious way where you're not trying to have a point of view. I do think it's nice to have one of the most fun things about gardening visually is to create these pictures and figure out well this bed is gonna be these these colors because I think they'll look really great at the you know like painting pictures in a way. Yeah, definitely. And you know and it is hard it really is hard But you don't have a color scheme for the whole place. It's not like you're saying, well, I don't ever have any of that here ever. And even things that you don't have a lot of, it's not like, forget about it forever. You're not, maybe someday you will try them. But you have guidelines, but not like some absolute rule about we only have blue and white here in my entire property or something like that, right? No, I wouldn't think that would be fun for me, it would be too restrictive. And I like to err on the side of being less restrictive than more restrictive. And I also have this thing that I didn't write this in the book, but you know, I know some people who I really like a lot. And sometimes I feel like their definition of themselves or their persona or their taste is through negation. Do you see what I'm saying? Yes. So, and I sometimes think about that for myself. And I was like, I don't want to be modeling my viewpoint on anything a visual thing or a taste thing or an idea by what I don't like. I want it to be about what I do like. So all the tables, all the colors I might have sidelined lately, like strong red, a lot of pink, maybe even like a school bus yellow, like a root back year, which I don't grow much. Those things are just kind of waiting, I think, down the way for me to find a way to use them. You know, you know, no, it's like they're there for me later as a child. I love the crayon box and I wanted the big one. I didn't want the little one. I wanted the big crayon box. Yeah. I loved learning when we talked earlier. I loved learning that you're a collector of bearded iris because oh my goodness the color palette in bearded iris is just phenomenal and you know they're not all purpley blue kind of things and there's a real incredible color range and then also since now as I mentioned in the introduction you finally have a place in in the ground in the soil with no deer visiting garden, you're having fun with tulips, and which otherwise would be just deer food. And those are lavishly colored or can be, you can pick incredible colors there. But those are two daring things, birded iris and tulips. You know, they're not shy when you start combining them. There's a lot going on to consider color wise, Yes. And same with high scents and I think that's what has caused me a little issue is I love all the highest scents but combining them can be really challenging because they do look so much like you know an Easter egg candy party. And so any flower that has a lot of colors in it like high-sensor irises or tulips or even orchids,

but those are different.

You just have to be careful with them and have a point of view of like, I'm going to

group them these ways. And the other thing I always tell myself is, they're very brief, high-sensor a few weeks, irises a few weeks. So, you know, it's a very brief thing. different when you're making the backbone of your garden a certain color and it's all season.

That's very different. That's very different, yes. I wanted to go through some of your guidelines, things that you do keep in mind. That one that we talked about when we did the time story, you talked about rather than invite a potential oopsie kind of thing, bring home a plant that looks really good in the nursery, but doesn't find a place in the garden, perhaps because of its color, to have a color scheme in mind when plant shopping. Like, that's one of the things that you try to do. You kind of try to be conscious about that, yes? Yes, absolutely. I try to have a kind of baseline color for different beds, really. And then right now I have a bed that I'm concentrating on more white and blue with some other things in it. I have another bed that I'm calling in the book I call vibratory tones. So the kind of ultraviolet end of the spectrum where the blues and the purples in this and the really bright colors of blue and purple and those magentists work together. I have a bit of a bed that that's what we're doing and then I have a long border that's harder to pull together because I have plants in there that aren't all in the same thing but it's a more complex color scheme with deep purple foliage, some deep purple flowers, some kind of movy colors, some rust colors, some pale yellow. I would call that a more adventurous scheme, do you see what I mean? Because it's a bunch of off colors. But I do think sometimes a bunch of off colors can yield a very sophisticated look if that's what you're going for. If you want to go for bright, Mondrian colors, you can do that too. You know, it's a different thing. Right. And you just mentioned folia, I think, for a second there. You know, one of the ways that we can, I don't know, kind of ground things or whatever is, is have some color. I don't even have to express this. I'm not an artisan, my thing. But we can have some kind of color, whether from foliage or from one, I'm thinking of a picture. I think there's a picture in the book or maybe I read about it in the book. You had two lips where you had very, very, very dark ones. Like what's that famous dark one called? Queen of the night. Queen of the night, yeah. You know, almost blackish purple. And you kind of wove that through all the way through this long border. And then there were lots of other colors of tulips. But that just helped it feel more grounded, kind of, just like dark foliage in their way of done. That was my hope is to use it like almost like a neutral and decorating. since I've worked at a bunch of home magazines like Martha Stuart Living and and housing garden and better homes and gardens and domino magazine you know color schemes are always expressed and neutrals are always discussed and there's always a new neutral being released from color of the and all these things and when I got my job at better Homes and Gardens, the previous editor and she left me some notes

on the desk, we're very kindly

and she wrote, Gail Butler was her name. And one of the lines she wrote as a joke at the end of the slide, she said, don't let the team convince you that orange is a neutral. So I thought that was funny. We joked about that for a few years. But for me, it's like anything can kind of be that binding color

and in those tulips that queen of the night color

with a bunch of other tulips that print with that same color, it's kind of fun to play with the different shapes too. So it's not all one tulip. You have that color in a bunch of other ones as well. One of the things in your sort of advice that you shared with me and is in the book. You really look for, you document things, both good ideas and things that didn't work. When you're developing a palette or when something maybe goes missed, you remember to sort of keep track. I love the idea of, you know, you look for scenes in the garden, of course, or someone else's garden that give you an idea of a color palette that work together. But also, even if things aren't planted together, I think, but you see them happening concurrently in the garden. You might take snippets and make like these still lifes and to remind yourself like, huh, I could put those together someday. Is that expressing that correctly?

It's kind of more actually less about me finding them in different places and putting them into a palette. It's more like that that palette is occurring in a space and I want to try. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's more like documenting, oh, this palette is occurring right now. And in a normal photograph, let's say I take a normal photograph of it. I can see some of it, but when I actually go get the snippets, it can inspire me to say

this lay down of it. I can see some of it, but when I actually go get the snippets, it can inspire me to say this lay down of silver's plums each, you know, apricot colors is actually something I want to go more towards. Okay. These plants are good examples, and it reminds me when I'm doing my plant dreaming and shopping in the winter to look at that photo and find more plants that are in that range. Right. Yeah. And I think you call it your... Journaling, you know, it's like journaling. I'm sorry, yeah, but I think you call that photo that you make of this sort of like still life, this lay down as you say of these snippets. Artfully arranged, I would also note that sort of your goal palette, you call it like your your goal. Like it's yeah yeah yeah and it's a great reminder because it is really hard you go to the garden center and you have what like a a one by two to inch picture something not even that big picture of a plant you know and it's asleep it's half asleep in the pot right it's yeah you know it's tricky to know what you're going to be getting. And so you have to have something in your mind, I think, firmly. And that helps with the gardener's mindset ideas, well, because all of this stuff we're talking about is us talking about plant, us sitting here thinking about color palettes and plant palettes and what plants have certain colors is Immediately distancing our brains from our everyday issues Everyday problems are to do list that we might have hanging over us You know a lot of us for me particularly what I hate is admin stuff like I need to check in on that insurance I need to make sure that this is occurring for this tax thing You know all that stuff all that can be swept away by these projects and also just the news of the world and what our phones drag us into politically. It's so great to be able to have the luxury of time and space to be able to think about something like the color of flowers, right? And not everybody gets a chance to do that. So if we get to have even on a windowsill or a small condo garden, all of that is a way to find some joy. Yeah, we have maybe three minutes or so to go and I wanted to just ask you about something that was a real aha for me. I hadn't really thought about it consciously. An overlooked factor about sort of how light changes throughout the day, but especially at evening and how so many of us have a space that we may use. I believe you have a patio in your backyard where you have a dining table that you use in the summer and beds near it and what should go in beds that are either where we look out or whether we're actually out in the garden in the evening. The colors and so forth. And so that was a kind of a great a-ha for me. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, I think I often often had moon light gardens in my repertoire of doing stories with magazines. They're often talking about moon light gardens. And that's always white, but silver foliage as well help.

But people tend to make these wider, silver foliage gardens for the moonlight. I discovered that blue is also a big glowing color during the glow mean to use that twilight phrase. So that, you know, kind of like when I said, when you scuba dive and you go deeper and deeper, all the reds and oranges and yellows go away first and you're left with greens and then ultimately just blues.

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