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www.landscapeirrigation.com Landscape and Irrigation October 2015 13 the mid-1800s. There are many interesting and skillfully designed satellite gardens, but the big show-stopper of the grounds is the central congregation of 75 annuals display beds. Garden Manager Andrew Koehn has been designing this display since 2005; the plants are grown on-site in the Mohonk production greenhouse. When you have that many display beds to design, it's helpful to have a theme to unify them. A theme gives direction in plant selection, plant combinations, and color choices so that there is visual coherence. It makes the designer step back and consider not just how one plant looks alongside another, but how the colors meld from bed to bed. Creatively chosen themes generate excitement for the viewers, and make things more interesting for the people working in them. Recent themes Koehn has selected for Mohonk's display beds include "The Planets," "South of the Border," "Box of Crayons," and "Out of Africa." Each year, his planting scheme is more ambitious, but he still comes up with simple, descriptive themes that make visitors buzz. "Box of Crayons" may sound childlike, but it allowed Koehn to play with color in a very sophisticated way. COLOR THEORY IN PRACTICE In 2013, Koehn came up with the "Box of Crayons" theme, which became very popular with garden visitors. "I so frequently get asked by guests about what's new in the plant world," said Koehn. "I had decided to plant 45 of the 75 beds with new varieties of annuals in every color of the rainbow. An intern said, 'You need to organize the colors so there's some thread that visitors can follow.'" Koehn came up with "Box of Crayons," with the eight basic colors in the typical crayon box including black, brown, pink — plus white. He knew they needed some simple props to make sure people "got" the motif, so he had larger-than-life rustic cedar sculptures made to look like crayons and mark color zones. The beds adjacent the crayon sculptures were plays on one color — for example, the white beds contained both white flowering plants such as dahlias and 'Diamond Frost' euphorbia but also dusty miller, which has a white sheen among its silver, and ornamental grasses with creamy white flowers. The orange zone contained huge sienna orange amaranth plants along with light- orange agastache and rusty-orange zinnias, among other beauties. The black zone was one of the more challenging for Koehn; he used the traffic-stopping 'Black Coral' colocasia for height and drama and nearby tried out 'Blackberry Jam' vinca and 'Black Satin' Sweetunias. The pink zone included pink dahlias and hot pink New Guinea impatiens and 'Whopper Rose' begonias. Koehn made sure the color zones "jumped the paths" so that so that there would be visual cohesiveness (indeed, the paths seemed to disappear). "If you have pink (or any color) on both sides of a path, it feels more coherent," said Koehn. The intervening beds played with color in two ways. Some reinforced the transitioning color zone, so that as visitors turned their heads. They could take in pink moving into purple, then purple moving into yellow, then yellow into orange … a seamless series of segues. The second kind of play was with complementary color combinations, such as red dahlias (near the red color zone) with nearly black alternanthera, the chartreuse foliage of jewels of Opar (near the yellow color zone) against the black foliage of 'Black Pearl' LANDSCAPE DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION The "South of the Border" 2014 display at Mohonk. A sculpture outside the Woodstock, N.Y. School of Art by Shelley Parriott helped inspire Koehn's "Box of Crayons" theme. The black, pink, and white color zones of the "Box of Crayons" theme. PHOTOS BY LARRY DECKER SCULPTURE PHOTO BY ANDREW KOEHN; BOX OF CRAYONS PHOTO BY LARRY DECKER PHOTO BY MICHELLE SUTTON