i live in mid-north GA. recently i've been given leeway to renovate the flowerbeds of the house i grew up in. they've languished since my mother died 20 years ago, my father is a farmer but has no use for ornamentals. first i started working on the border of the east facing once rose now tomato beds, filling in the border by moving liriope and adding the marigold and johnny jump ups i remember (very hard to find colored viola seeds). that worked, then i planted sunflowers in the north facing bed, which had only a few tired shrubs. now i want to really do something to the west facing bed . now, i'm huge SF fan and i remember a story by HPLovecraft called 'the color out of space' about a meteorite infecting this valley so the plants all changed to some unnamable color. then there's the 'War Against the Chtorr' about earth being invaded by an alien ecosystem that is red-pigment based..... what i want is for the bed to look like its being overcome with purple. i want purple flowering vines and purple leaf sweet potatoes choking the shrubs and to go with the purple hyacinths and crocus i remember from childhood, purple crinums, purple leaf elephant ear, etc. the new plants should show wild, verdant (well, purple-dant) growth over the tame, box cut shrubs. but of course, it's all carefully arranged and tended. my tentative list: vines: passionflower (very alien), bougainvillia, clematis, morning glory, maybe tweedia bulbs: allium, crocus, hyacinth (grape?), taro, purple calla lilies? i know i can grow plants, but i've never attempted something this ambitious. and aesthetically questionable. how hard would this be to maintain? will it eat my house (not sure i'd mind)? i'm trying to select for overlapping blooms and tolerance for our soil types (tired azalea bed over red clay). any pointers?
I think you need to research on how wide and tall each vine will get as some of them can get quite large and may over come the less aggressive vines. A white vine and/or a few white flowers would make the purple stand out even more than all purple.
Did you grow up during the Barney the Big Purple Dinosaur craze ? I love purple but there can be such a thing as too much of a good thing. Like 2ofus suggested, adding white will make the purple stand out, not overwhelm. Knowing your hardiness zone will help us suggest and you choose the proper vines and other plants for your garden. Looking at the USDA zone map mid-north Georgia is mostly zone 6 and 7. Most of what you have listed will be iffy as perennials north of zone 8, they will need lots of mulch in a harsh winter or be dug up to store in a warm place over winter. Most likely you will be replanting every year. Especially the Sweet Potato vines, they are annuals down here in zone 8. And since the listed plants are rated zone 8-11 that means they grow and bloom best in hot weather. Depending on what you summers are like they might not produce the purple blooms as abundantly as you want. You will have a later growing season with the bulbs you mention since cool Spring temperatures arrive later in the year for you. To find plants that will be relatively work free, you might want to wander through a local garden center to see what they are selling in your area and suggest for you soil conditions too. You could call a your local Country Extension office, they are connected with local state universities and typically manned by Master Gardeners who can answer questions about your particular growing conditions, temp and soil. You have a big project but it can be a very rewarding one and healthy too.
Tantric, First let me say welcome to the Stew. Secondly, as a fellow SF nerd (especially of the Lovecraftian sort) I salute your Color Out of Space reference. I'm not much of a flower gardener so I will leave it to them to help you along the way. I do think a white or yellow spaced in there would help contrast! Happy planting.
Tantric, welcome to the forum. Parrot tulips will not last very long in the garden for the contrast, most likely they will never be seen as contrast since they bloom so early in the season compared tot he rest of your choices. Purple is also a receding color, meaning your eye sees that color last of all colors on the spectrum. We always use purple to give depth to flower arrangement rather than being the focal color. Purple is a great color choice, but you need to add other colors with it to be able to differentiate between shade and hues of the color. You will have a great dark mass for a flowerbed instead of what you were trying to achieve. By all means use purple, but you also need other colors in there. Where do you live? that will also define what you can use. I could never use passionvine or bouganvillia.
i'm in north GA. another option would be to use only plants with red/purple foliage, and let them bloom as may. i think part of my inspiration is the local places where wisteria and kudzu swallow whole forests - both 'alien invasives'. when i was an ecology grad student, we had a courtyard with rafters overgrown with wisteria - there were always bumblebees and anoles. fantastic - but the administration had it cut down, as we had a lab devoted to dealing with invasive exotics. i'm afraid i did something rash to give a voice to that little stump, that caused a brouhaha, but not apropos here. i want it to be swallowed in purple, lavender, indigo and scarlet, overgrown, lush and not right...like these fields. but unlike them, hugely diverse in plant species - and note that i'm not crazy enough to plant real kudzu or wisteria. besides, it is next to my lavender bed (under an dogwood, circular bed), where i'm going to grow lavender as a crop. i believe i'm allowed to quote short passages from books where i give credit under fair usage, right? Now only a few stands of trees stood empty and alone. What little Terran vegetation remained was sickly and weak. The patches of it became rarer and rarer, until at last there were no more to be seen. By contrast, the Chtorran vegetation grew ever more ripe and exultant. It was a lush presence, rich and startling, breaking out everywhere in riotous splashes of saturated color that spread joyously across the ground. We flew across a rumpled rainbow carpet-the naked jungle was striped now with moody purple groves of death, pink and blue fields of something that glowed like frozen cyanide, stripes of strident orange poison, and towering black shambler groves dripping with red and silver veils; they looked like brooding cancerous whores. -Season for Slaughter, War Against the Chtorr #4, David Gerrold (description of the dying Amazon)
good thinking. I was worried until I got to that sentence. But a goat would help with the problem if you chose to use either of them.
