A well-designed garden will have a variety of colors to please the eye. Of course, everyone has their own personal favorite palette for flowers and many, many flowers will fit the bill. Annuals, perennials and biennials now come in just about every color imaginable. Want a brightly colored garden? Try red-hot geraniums or salvia. Do pastels and a more calming palette suit your style better? Light pinks to dark purples can be found in everything from petunias to lupines. And even those of us who like foliage plants will have a wide choice of greens to include for interest. Chartreuse to emerald, there’s a plant to suit every desire. There are also reddish or black foliage plants to add some pops of color. Think about the Japanese maple ‘Bloodgood’ with its dark red leaves. Or the popular black mondo grass that seems to grow well in sun or shade.
A very well-designed garden will add a layer of interest by including different scents as well. Herbs like rosemary, thyme and lavenders, and flowers like roses and lilies are but a few of the possibilities of aromas that provide that extra fragrance. Sweet peas, heliotropes, nicotiana and daphne ordora can stop you in your tracks with their perfume.
But very few gardeners take it one step further and include sound in their gardens.
On occasion, after a good afternoon’s work in the garden, I like to just sit with a glass of iced tea and enjoy the fruits of my labor. I sometimes will close my eyes and listen to the world around me. And there are so many things going on!
The little birds have hatched and they are making lots of noise so their mothers and fathers will return to the nest with a juicy morsel. Or the adult birds are singing an evening song for no other reason than they celebrate life. Once in a while, I will hear the screech of an eagle as she returns to her nest in the Coast Range.
But if I sit long enough, I can hear so many more sounds around me. Bees buzzing from flower to flower as they feed on nectar from my flowers. Hummingbirds whiz by, too, but their wings make a soft hum as they fly. If the hummers think I am encroaching on their feeding grounds, they will stop and scold me.
On very quiet evenings, I can often hear the waves crashing along the jetties as the sounds of the ocean soothe my soul.
And those are just the natural sounds. I have also incorporated some man-made sounds into my garden. I don’t have room in my small yard for a fountain, but I find a small ceramic bubbler creates lovely background music to the birds and bees. There are tabletop models but mine happens to be a larger style that will take about two gallons of water. A craftier person than myself could no doubt put one together themselves with only a pump and maybe some wine bottles or glass jars.
You can have speakers in your garden to play your favorite music, too. There are so many types and styles now that I can’t even begin to understand the technology behind them. I would caution not to play the music so loud as to bother the neighbors, though. Mozart or Jay-Z may not be music to everyone’s ears.
But my favorite non-natural sounds are made with wind chimes and I have a wide assortment. Bamboo wind chimes have a very tropical feel to them; chimes made from sea shells have a higher-pitched sound. My personal favorites are a set of chimes made from stainless steel. I had heard a special one at a very dear friend’s home and, when the breeze blew they almost sounded as if they were playing a classical symphony. They were longer than most I had and so when I found a set similar to my friend’s at an estate sale, I snatched them up and have enjoyed them ever since.
I have some of my wind chimes hung on plant hooks on the potting shed and the house. I have smaller ones hanging on branches of trees and shrubs. When the wind blows even the slightest bit, the combination of sounds from the wind chimes can’t help but make me smile. I don’t have one outside my bedroom window, though, as that would be too much on those windy nights in the winter.
Who of us can’t use a little extra music in our lives?
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