Home: In the Garden: Brush With Nature

Jake flat-out admitted he didn’t care. Doug, unfortunately, had an opinion, and it wasn’t the same as mine. He wanted White Willow, and I wanted the color that was one shade deeper than that, something called Spring Morn. I went with my gut and bought five gallons of Spring Morn.

You know how home design magazines always say you should paint a big square of the color you want on your wall before you buy all the paint, as a test? I never do that. Once I make up my mind, I’m like a painting dervish. I can’t wait to start. But from now on, I’m going to follow that advice. Because from the first roller-swipe of Spring Morn that I applied in the upstairs hallway, I knew the color was wrong. There was nothing Spring Morn about the paint in that can. It should have been called Pistachio Ice Cream, or else The Color That Cotton Candy Would Be If It Were Green Instead of Pink. It was garish. Hideous. Awful. And I gritted my teeth and got to work and applied it to the approximately 10,000 square feet of wall that make up my upstairs hallway and stairwell and living room.

Jake was very kind. “It’s nice and bright and clean,” he told me, after the week I put in painting.

Doug couldn’t resist rubbing it in a little: “It reminds me of cheap rental houses at the Shore.” Which was actually exactly what I was thinking. Maybe all those houses are painted with cans of Spring Morn that get returned by appalled customers once they see the shade in the test patches they put on their walls.

And to make matters worse, Spring Morn totally clashed with all the other greens in the living room, including an antique cabinet I painted years ago in something called Mermaid Song, and the banister and newel posts, which I whimsically topped off in a deep, rich enamel dubbed Treasure Isle. In horror, I retreated to my garden (right, right, the column’s called “In the Garden”) and sat in my yellow Adirondack chair (it’s Melted Butter, if you must know), and contemplated why no matter how I mix up the plants I put in the ground, nothing ever clashes with its neighbors there.

I mean, in my garden, the mid-green of my forsythia isn’t a bit offended by being next to the deep green of my English rosebush, which happily abides beside a blue-green-leaved clematis, which is only complemented by the browny-green trumpet vine, which sets off the fuzzy gray-green lamb’s ears. And the same goes for flowers. I positively admire the neon-pink geranium beside the plum-purple petunias and the cherry-red begonias, with a few yellow gerberas and bright-blue cornflowers thrown in. In fact, some of my favorite flowers are those that offer, all in one blossom, the most outrageous combinations of colors, like zany gazania, which might have orange petals striped with crimson surrounding a lime-green fringe circling a purple eye.

So I can think of two reasons why the colors inside my house are inclined to jar, while those outside coexist in perfect harmony. First theory: There are so many more colors outdoors, what with the blue sky and gray tree trunks and white garage and Melted Butter Adirondack chairs, not to mention the cardinals and swallows and blue jays and butterflies and that damned black cat from two doors down, that your sight is constantly being distracted, unlike indoors, where you sit with a glass of wine in front of Law & Order: SVU reruns and stare at the handprints on the stairwell wall for 15 years. And the other theory is that whoever made up the color palette outdoors didn’t give a rat’s ass about seductive names or the opinions of others, and thus clearly is a Superior Being to me.