We would suggest rather the sparing use of strong bold color. Such colors must be held in check, if the quietness of the garden is to be preserved. Most gardens need brilliant yellow, strong red, orange, and intense blue but only in proper relationship to other hues, and only when and where needed.

To women, red is usually the most intense color, but sci ence maintains that yellow is the most brilliant, blue the dull est, and red and green about equal. Men usually feel that yellow is more intense than red. The fact that red blindness is common in men and rare in women has bearing on the use of color in gardens. Women will usually prefer soft colors, men the stronger ones.

Dominant Color Schemes

A helpful method for those whose color sense is not exces sively developed (and this includes most of us), is dependent on a dominant color-a single hue, tint, or shade used through out the garden. Masses of it are maintained at every season of the flowering year. The effect is that of a single color, but other colors are introduced in smaller groups as contrasts and foils for the dominant masses. When used in this manner, the lesser colors do not compete but accentuate.

For example, if you have a leaning toward blue, use groups of various blue iris in the spring picture, followed by lupines, delphinium, ageratum, blue salvia, the speedwells, and finally great clumps of hardy fall asters and monkshood. With these blues, plant a small amount of white, yellow, orange, as well as some pink and pale rose. The blue, of course, will not al ways be "true," for this is fairly rare in nature. There will be various tints and shades of blue, blue-violet, mauve, and pure violet, but the general effect will be blue. Gertrude Jekyll felt that the blue-mauve colors should never be used with true blue, but as one colorist expresses it, Miss Jekyll was the only person she ever heard of who could keep them apart.

If you delight in yellow and want a garden that always seems full of sunlight, begin with long narrow drifts of narcissus and yellow tulips, follow with iris, the various daylilies (a good selection gives an extremely long period of bloom), hardy garden lilies, coreopsis, annuals from creamy yellow to strong yellow and orange, perennial blackeyed Susan (Rud beckia speciosa), and end up the season with helinium, heli anthus, and hardy chrysanthemums.