This 3-plant color recipe for the spring garden shines with sunny yellow

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of GROW’s 2023 garden-party game, a mashup of plants, design and color theory that offers a color recipe of striking 1-2-3 plant combinations for Pacific Northwest gardens each season.

SPRING IS HERE, which means it’s time for another round of this year’s garden-party game (that I made up) exploring designing with colorful plants. By April, we’re all longing for sun. However, if this spring is anything like the last — and the one before that — the next few months will bring more gray skies and rain. So, let’s plant some botanical sunshine. Our 1-2-3 vernal color recipe is illuminated by yellow.

Ingredients

● Columnar golden yew (Taxus baccata ‘Standishii’) reads like a slender shaft of sunlight in the landscape. Bright yellow spring growth holds well into summer before settling down to a golden glaze that contrasts with dark green interior needles. Like other yews, this plant tolerates full sun to full shade, but more sun or bright open shade produces the most luminous color. A slow-growing conifer with upright stems and a compact growing habit, ‘Standishii’ provides a lasting garden focal point or anchors a container composition without outgrowing its placement.

● Like the name suggests, golden variegated ‘Kaleidoscope’ abelia (Abelia × grandiflora ‘Kaleidoscope’) serves up a variety of hues throughout the growing season. Spring growth emerges bright yellow and lime green. Summer ripens the leaves to a glossy gold until cooling fall temperatures induce a foliar flush of orange and red. ‘Kaleidoscope’ is semi-evergreen with low-mounding growth to 2-by-3 feet. The plant tolerates light shade, but you’ll get the best show of colors with more sun. Lightly fragrant white blooms in summer and fall add another sense dimension to this handsome plant and attract bees and butterflies.

Adventurous spirits and gardeners looking for even more seasonal color might risk substituting Magic Carpet Spirea (Spiraea japonica ‘Walbuma’) for ‘Kaleidoscope’ abelia. New growth on this deciduous dwarf shrub breaks bright yellow and bronze before turning a soft yellow by late spring, at which point lacy clusters of deep pink flowers appear. Candy-heart pink flowers against yellow foliage are not for everyone; some gardeners even choose to remove the blooms. But hey, it’s spring — it’s OK to get a little giddy.

● Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra) gilds our color recipe with fine texture and movement. Spring foliage appears acid-yellow on the cultivar ‘All Gold’, while ‘Aureola’ presents with fresh strappy leaves striped with bright green and gold. Both plants grow to just over a foot tall, forming an arching mound of light foliage that waves in the slightest breeze. Established in numbers, this graceful ornamental grass ripples and flows like water. Protect Japanese forest grass from hot afternoon sun to avoid scorching the foliage, and provide regular water during dry months. Cooling temperatures cast the foliage with shades of wine before it fades to a pleasing straw color in dormancy.

Mix to combine
Not only does this trio of plants brighten a sodden, overcast spring; the combination also carries on through the year, lending contrast to sunny beds and borders or lighting up corners of the garden in partial shade. As noted above, the golden color on all three plants is stronger with a bit of light.

For an informal garden composition, place the yew off-center, flanked by the abelia to one side. Soften the edges of the planting with a ruff of Japanese forest grass. Or shift the arrangement to a large container anchoring a patio seating area in partial shade. Summer blooms on the abelia will fill the space with a delicate fragrance.

Given that this is a recipe for spring, it’s only natural that we include a dash, or maybe a generous helping, of cheery yellow daffodils. You’ll have to allow daffodil leaves to die down completely to bolster future blooms, but layering the bulbs among the crowns of Japanese forest grass cleverly disguises the ripening foliage.