Designing a Bulb Garden? What if Mary Blair Helped?

I almost forgot about these tulips and other spring bulbs in crazy color combinations that I saw at the Smith College Spring Bulb Show last February. A crazy mix of what seemed like every color in some crazy Dutch palette became jumbled together into a candy colored bejeweled expression. Only recently, these reminded me of Mary Blair color palettes – the Disney colorist behind many of Walt Disney’s feature animated films in the mid twentieth century. Last Saturday I rented a live action film, How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, a film featuring Mary Blair as color designer.  No one could combine coral, watermelon, cherry red, tangerine and mango along with burgundy, brown and buff and the perfect shade of periwinkle, like Mary could. She was able to combine colors in ways no one else had ever dare tried, and even though she remains a strong influence today with many graphic and animation artists, applying her palettes to the garden never entered my mind, until this week. I am currently planning my Mary Blair inspired bulb garden.

Way back in snowy February again, at the Smith College Bulb Show, the colors were at first shocking, but not because of their intensity, but because of the kinetic dance they produced. When combined with white, yellow and orange narcissus, they all worked together.  I was so struck at how what seemed like every tulip variety available in a any Dutch bulb catalog mixed so well together. It just defied any law of color theory or garden design, and this experience has inspired me to plan my first project for 2013 – My Mary Blair Tulip border, which I will be planting in front of the greenhouse, and along the boxwood hedge. 

There has to be some science as to why tulips all look great no matter how you mix them up. One theory I have is that tulips all share a base pigment – a certain magenta, or deep pink that makes a bright red tulip look perfectly natural when planted next to a pink one, not to mention the magic that happens when one combines watermelon colored tulips with raspberry and coral ones.  Throw in white narcissus with mango colored trumpets, and suddenly, exclamation points appear. It doesn’t seem,to matter what color one chooses with most spring bulbs, the Mary Blair palette just gets better. Periwinkle hyacinths, Tangerine tulips, saffron, cotton candy, lemon, blush and buff – planning a tulip garden should never cause any of us any stress. Mix it up and shock your neighbors.

Recent trends confirm my observation – tulips are best when mixed and matched, even when no one is there to select the perfect tones for you. But they even look better when you step away from a mono-culture palette – when one does carefully curate selected varieties into toned collections – where many similar tints and tones blend together as if a pointillist artist splattered dots and specs of opposing colors to create a new one.