Ecology & Color

By Felicia Fredd

Have you ever had a moment with a garden, or ‘built landscape’—a perfectly normal one—where the normality of it suddenly seemed perfectly bizarre? It happens to me all the time—even on projects I, myself, have designed.

It’s not so much the ridiculous effort required to organize outdoor space—and to keep it that way—as it is the specific choices intended to create a coherent and blissful experience, which can often seem quite strange. Most of us evaluate environmental quality effortlessly, but the specific visual 'languages' that shape overall impressions are less apparent —and are, in fact, the subject of many ecological planning and design studies.

Ecologists are urging us to rethink how we alter landscapes. We, the people, don’t like change. Change is strange—probably no stranger, on average, than what we accept as normal at any given moment—but our attachments to the familiar run deep. So, researchers have been trying to better understand the specific cues that inform us that something is ‘right’ or ‘attractive’ in landscape, and why. There are cultural biases involved, of course, but they study that too, all for the purpose of gaining support for protection and care of the environment.

In reviewing some of these studies, one thing I feel has changed in my thinking—at least a bit—is with regard to the significance of color in landscape/garden environments. Check out this title: Bibliometric Analyses of Factors Influencing Color Preferences in Urban Environmental Spaces: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12101126/. The ‘wow’ factor is also interesting: All About the ‘Wow Factor’? The Relationships Between Aesthetics, Restorative Effect and Perceived Biodiversity in Designed Urban Planting: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169204617300701

I love studying color, but I’ve always felt that it’s ultimately the spatial relationships, forms, textures, and plays of light in a given landscape that are fundamental to a special sense of place. I have a really hard time when a particular plant is rejected because it ‘doesn’t bloom long enough’ to justify its existence, or ‘earn its keep’. I’ve heard such things for years during the design process.

The number one thing most people request upfront is low-water-use plants, and the second most important parameter given is overall low maintenance; however, most people will easily walk back those basic goals in order to get more intense color throughout the growing season—throughout all seasons, actually. In addition to having a more ‘garden-worthy’ feel (and what exactly does that mean?), non-natives have been modified over and over to deliver more color and satisfying bloom over longer periods of time. Both of these topics are complex, but right now, I’m feeling like, okay, I just need to step up to that without sacrificing ecological goals.

​I have been documenting native plants in my local environment, taking lots of pictures, and experimenting with these plants in my emerging garden space. The following are color studies for plants blooming at the same time in Abiquiú this spring. It’s not all-encompassing or necessarily mind-blowing, but it’s just to illustrate that there is color there to be organized. You will see just a few non-natives in the mix, but it’s about 90% native. I’ve also added some pics of additional details such as shadows, bugs, yellow rocks, and rusted metal. I’ve not, until just now, thought of a color study as literally organizing color—which is weird when you think about it too much.