HOW CONFIDENT are you about the use of color in your garden, and where do you draw your inspiration from for creating a pleasing palette? The topic of color is just one of many that Stephen Orr tackles in his new book, “The Gardener’s Mindset: Connecting with Nature Through Plants,” and we talked together recently about how he’s finding his way to some combinations that please him through his own garden experiments.

Stephen, the former editor-in-chief of “Better Homes & Gardens,” is embarking on the fifth growing season at the home he shares with his husband on Cape Cod. It’s their fourth garden and their most ambitious one, a place that presented new realities to acclimate to like sandy soil, but also at least one form of great relief: Finally, no deer.

(Above, one of his tactics for keeping track of color ideas that work is to take snippets of plants of a given moment in the garden and photograph them as a still-life, for future inspiration.)

Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page for a chance to win a copy of “The Gardener’s Mindset” (affiliate link).

Read along as you listen to the May 4, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

using color in the garden, with stephen orr

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Margaret Roach: Hello, Stephen. Spring up there?

Stephen Orr: It’s spring. Finally spring and it feels like spring, so that’s wonderful.

Margaret: And I’ve been enjoying it. And we did a fun “New York Times” garden column together recently, and I got to kind of know the book through doing that. The opening sentence of the book, “The Gardener’s Mindset,” made me laugh out loud and I’m laughing again now. It says, “My garden exists mostly deep within my brain.” So this plant stuff has really made its mark on you, huh?

Stephen: Yeah.

Margaret: It got in there.

Stephen: Well, I think I’m just always imagining what I want to occur in the garden. And so I think I do sometimes feel like people come visit and they’re more disappointed than I think. Not disappointed, but you realize sometimes people don’t see what you see. And I just have so many visions of what … I mean, gardening for me is very much an act of faith, as we all know. You’re doing something knowing that you’ll be back. You’re going to be here when it occurs. You’re planting a bulb and you are expecting to be in the same place next spring when the bulb comes up.

And so I think everything we’re doing, whether we’re sowing some seeds or planting some trees, is an act of faith in the future, that we’re going to be here to see it and appreciate it. And so I just love that part of gardening. I think that’s what I mean by that—being mostly in my brain—is the planting and the creative wheels turning, especially in the offseason of winter, really is what excites me a lot. The realities definitely do, but as my husband would tell you, I’m really great at planting a bunch of stuff. Maintenance, not as much.

Margaret: [Laughter.] Well, join the club. So then tell us about the gardener’s mindset, because maybe that’s a different thing slightly. The title of the book, “The Gardener’s Mindset,” is that kind of being in the moment? Because I feel like when I’m out there, I’m only there. I’m not distracted. When I’m in the house working, whatever, I want to think of a thousand other things to do.

Stephen: Exactly. And that’s exactly the way I feel. I used to do yoga more than I do now. I hurt my back in yoga. They say don’t be competitive, but I did try to bend too far. But it reminds me of yoga in that when you’re doing yoga, what makes it a meditation, even aside from shavasana, the final pose, is that you’re moving so much, you’re not able to think of anything else except for the actions of your body and your moving. I feel like gardening to me is very much that same thing where I enjoy all the different things I need to be doing each day. I try not to let them stress me out; I try to enjoy them. And as you know, when you walk from one task to another, you see 50 other tasks that you want to do or that need to be done.

So there is that kind of ADD quality as well, that I’m trying to make sure I don’t get distracted and I stay focused. But even that, I think is a really nice mindset idea of my goal this morning was: to get this new mulch onto these beds and plant these seeds that need to go in at this time of year; anything else I walk by can wait.

You see what I’m saying? So there’s kind of an immediacy of being present, but also staying focused. Otherwise, everything you walk by will need some attention and you’ll be distracted.

Margaret: Right. Oh, I totally agree [laughter]. Earlier on I was not able to make myself just do the chore that I had assigned myself for the day and I would just run around like a crazy person and never really finish anything. And it’s very important, I think, because it’s so satisfying visually also; we get that visual reward when we’ve actually completed something.

Stephen: Work from start to finish. And I think that’s the practical side. The more spiritual side would be being outside in nature. One of my main points with the book was to encourage people to garden so that they’re more connected to nature, especially as our world becomes more meta, literally and figuratively meta, governed by big tech companies, AI.

All the things coming at us all the time that are trying to gain our attention and market to us all the time and sell us things: I do think gardening is an act of rebellion against that. I know we all want to shop and I want to buy plants, but I want to buy from the mom and pop nursery. I don’t want to have to buy everything from a huge retailer. And so I think gardening is a great way to kind of unplug and almost resist the pull of technology and marketing that we’re all inundated with these days.

Margaret: So this is a book of essays; “The Gardener’s Mindset” is a book of essays. And you say it’s kind of an homage to books of essays that helped form you as a gardener. And by the way, of course, when I read it, I was like, “I’ve got that on my shelf. I’ve got that on my shelf. I’ve got that on my shelf.” It was like we were reading the same books. And I think whatever vintage the different ones are, they’re as relevant when they were written as they are, when you and I read them, as they are today—they’re just these great essays. So just tell us a couple; people might not know some of them or haven’t read them. Any favorite sort of greatest hits that shouldn’t be missed, do you think?

Stephen: Well, I do think there’s some classics like Vita Sackville-West who wrote for the newspaper; her garden at Sissinghurst that she created with her husband. And so I do think I come to Vita’s essays a lot because they have a lot to do with taste and her ideas of what should happen and things that she loves. And knowing her background as a very flamboyant, Bohemian person, aristocratic person as well, you just kind of see things through a different lens than I would coming from a medium-sized town in West Texas [laughter]. So hearing someone from that era speak is great.

Other people who wrote essay books or books with a lot of words like Gertrude Jekyll, I think you and I discussed, not the best, most interesting writer; kind of writes about plants in a very dry way. Other people that stand out to me are Henry Mitchell, who was a columnist for the, I think “The Washington Post.”

And he’s very opinionated. I think Mirabel Osler, her book, “A Gentle Plea for Chaos,” which really gave me the idea that you can be messier and let nature take a hand in your garden;  you don’t have to be so suburban and tidy.

So there’s just so many of them and some of them are particular to certain types of gardening like herb gardening. But I think the main thing I like is anyone who’s expressing an opinion that is from their own personal experience, we all turn to that now, but we call it Reddit [laughter]. People go get stuff on Reddit, which is just a bunch of people’s personal opinions about a topic. These are well-written essays by people who knew things in the past 100 years.

Margaret: Right. And they would’ve all been qualified to write an encyclopedia of gardening, but they chose not to. They chose to express it in that essay, that from the heart and the mind format, right? It was teaching, but it was also inspiration and emotion and a lot of other things.

Stephen: And they needed more how-to books then because they didn’t have the internet. Now we have YouTube and everything you can find, any specific task you can Google to find.

And so the kind of book that maybe I was reading when I was starting to be a gardener in the ’90s with a rooftop in Manhattan, that’s where I really started picking up these books, even though what they were writing about was not that applicable to a rooftop [laughter].

But I could extrapolate what they were saying and I could grow old roses because of the way Vita described, what’s the one that she likes so much? It was French name or something, which is ‘Cuisse de Nymphe Émue’ or blushing nymph’s thigh was one of her favorite roses. If you know Vita is an interesting rose choice for her. [Laughter.]

Margaret: Oh, well, I see. O.K. We’ll move on from there.

Stephen: Pardon my French.

Margaret: Yes, that’s fine. And so one of the topics that some of these books covered, probably all of them at one time or another covered, was color. And that’s what you and I talked about when we did the Times gardening column recently. And you share in the book some advice you have for using it and finding your way with it.

And in the book you say something also that made me laugh: You said, “there are no bad colors, just colors used badly,” but you said that not in the voice of a critic of other people, but as a perpetrator of some combinations that you felt didn’t work very well in your various gardens and someone who has strived and continues to strive to become more confident with combining colors in the garden, yes?

Stephen: Yes. And you and I had a whole talk a week or two ago, and since then I’ve had another unfortunate bulb explosion [laughter] with my daffodils hitting up against, this time, candy-colored hyacinth. So the backyard looks like Peter Rabbit’s-

Margaret: Menagerie.

Stephen: Menagerie or some sort of children’s book from the 20s. And that can be good or bad, if that’s what you’re after. It’s just not what I was after.

Margaret: And so if people don’t know what you’re referring to is that-

Stephen: I had a different thing in mind. And Chad [Jacobs, my husband] and I already talked about ways to kind of move some stuff around to fix it. But I’m not trying to be perfectionist with color or wag my finger at people. And when I say “no bad colors, just colors used badly,” I’d probably amend that to say colors used in an unconscious way where you’re not trying to have a point of view. I do think it’s nice to have … One of the most fun things about gardening, visually, is to create these pictures and figure out, well, this bed is going to be these colors because I think they’ll look really great at this time.

Margaret: Like painting pictures in a way.

Stephen: Yeah, definitely.

Margaret: And it is hard. It really is hard, but you don’t have a color scheme for the whole place. It’s not like you’re saying, “Well, I don’t ever have any of that here ever.” And even things that you don’t have a lot of, it’s not like forget about it forever. Maybe someday you will try them. But you have guidelines, but not like some absolute rule about “We only have blue and white here in my entire property” or something like that, right?

Stephen: No, I wouldn’t think that would be fun for me. It would be too restrictive. And I like to err on the side of being less restrictive than more restrictive. And I also have this thing that I didn’t write this in the book, but I know some people who I really like a lot and sometimes I feel like their definition of themselves or their persona or their taste is through negation. Do you see what I’m saying?

Margaret: Yes.

Stephen: And I sometimes think about that for myself and I was like, I don’t want to be modeling my viewpoint on anything, a visual thing or a taste thing or an idea, by what I don’t like. I want it to be about what I do like. So all the tables, all the colors I might have sidelined lately—like strong red, a lot of pink, maybe even like a schoolbus yellow, like a rudbeckia, which I don’t grow much—those things are just kind of waiting, I think, down the way for me to find a way to use them in a way. No, it’s like they’re there for me later. As a child, I love the crayon box and I wanted the big one. I didn’t want the little one. I wanted the big crayon box with all the colors.

Margaret: I loved learning when we talked earlier that you’re a collector of bearded iris, because, oh my goodness, the color palette in bearded iris is just phenomenal. And they’re not all purple-y blue kind of things, and there’s a real incredible color range. And then also since now, as I mentioned in the introduction, you finally have a place in the ground, in the soil, with no deer visiting the garden, you’re having fun with tulips, which otherwise would be just deer food. And those are lavishly colored or can be; you can pick incredible colors there. But those are two daring things: Bearded iris and tulips, they’re not shy when you start combining them. There’s a lot going on to consider color-wise, yes?

Stephen: And same with hyacinths. And I think that’s what has caused me a little issue is I love all the hyacinths, but combining them can be really challenging because they do look so much like an Easter egg candy party. And so any flower that has a lot of colors in it, like hyacinths or irises or tulips or even orchids, but those are different. You just have to be careful with them and have a point of view of like, “I’m going to group them these ways.”

And the other thing I always tell myself is they’re very brief. Hyacinths are a few weeks, irises are a few weeks. So it’s a very brief thing. It’s different when you’re making the backbone of your garden a certain color and it’s all season. That’s very different.

Margaret: That’s very different, yes. And so I wanted to kind of go through some of your guidelines, things that you do keep in mind. I mean, that one that we talked about when we did the Times story, you talked about rather than invite a potential “oopsie” kind of thing, and bring home a plant that looks really good in the nursery but doesn’t find a place in the garden, perhaps because of its color, to have a color scheme in mind when plant shopping. That’s one of the things that you try to do, you kind of try to be conscious about that, yes?

Stephen: Yes, absolutely. I try to have a kind of baseline color for different beds really. And then right now I have a bed that I’m concentrating on more white and blue with some other things in it. I have another bed that in the book I call vibratory tones. So the kind of ultraviolet end of the spectrum, where the blues and the purples and the really bright colors of blue and purple and those magentas work together. I’ve got a bed that’s what we’re doing.

And then I have a long border that’s harder to pull together because I have plants in there that aren’t all in the same theme, but it’s a more complex color scheme with deep purple foliage, some deep purple flowers, some kind of mauve-y colors, some rust colors, some pale yellow. I would call that a more adventurous scheme. Do you see what I mean? Because it’s a bunch of off-colors. But I do think sometimes a bunch of off-colors can yield a very sophisticated look if that’s what you’re going for. If you want to go for bright Mondrian colors, you can do that, too. It’s a different thing.

Margaret: Right. And you just mentioned foliage, I think, for a second there. One of the ways that we can, I don’t know, kind of ground things or whatever is have some color… I don’t even know how to express this [laughter]. I’m not … Art isn’t my thing, but we can have some kind of color, whether from foliage or from one, I’m thinking of a picture. I think there’s a picture in the book, or maybe I read about it in the book, you had tulips where you had very, very, very dark ones. What’s that famous dark one called?

Stephen: ‘Queen of the Night.’

Margaret: ‘Queen of Night,’ yeah. Almost blackish-purple, and you kind of wove that through all the way through this long border. And then there were lots of other colors of tulips, but that just helped it feel more grounded kind of, just like dark foliage in there would’ve done.

Stephen: That was my hope is to use it almost like a neutral in decorating. Since I’ve worked at a bunch of home magazines like “Martha Stewart Living” and “House & Garden” and “Better Homes & Gardens” and “Domino” magazine, color schemes are always expressed and neutrals are always discussed and there’s always a new neutral being released. [Above, a garden moment of various blues with asters, Geranium ‘Rozanne,’ and skullcap (Scutellaria)]. 

And when I got my job at “Better Homes & Gardens,” the previous editor-in-chief left me some notes on the desk, very kindly. And she wrote—Gail Butler was her name—and one of the lines she wrote as a joke at the end was like, she said, “Don’t let the team convince you that orange is a neutral.” [Laughter.]  So I thought that was funny. We joked about that for a few years.

But for me, it’s like anything can kind of be that binding color and those tulips, that ‘Queen of the Night’ color with a bunch of other tulip that different with that same color, it’s kind of fun to play with the different shapes, too, so it’s not all one tulip. You have that color and a bunch of other ones as well.

Margaret: One of the things in your sort of advice that you shared with me and is in the book, you document things, both good ideas and things that didn’t work. When you’re developing a palette or when something maybe goes amiss, you remember to sort of keep track. And I love the idea of you look for scenes in the garden, of course, or someone else’s garden that give you an idea of a color palette that worked together. But also even if things aren’t planted together, I think, but you see them happening concurrently in the garden, you might take snippets and make like these still-lifes and to remind yourself like, “Huh, I could put those together someday.” Am I expressing that correctly?

Stephen: It’s kind of more actually less about me finding them in different places and putting them into a palette. It’s more that that palette is occurring in a space and I want to try-

Margaret: Oh, O.K.

Stephen: Yeah. It’s more like documenting, oh, this palette is occurring right now. And in a normal photograph, let’s say I take a normal photograph of it, I can see some of it, but when I actually go get the snippets, it can inspire me to say this lay-down of silvers, plums, peach apricot colors is actually something I want to go more towards [above]. These plants are good examples, and it reminds me when I’m doing my plant dreaming and shopping in the winter to look at that photo and find more plants that are in that range. Journaling, it’s like journaling. Yeah.

Margaret: I think you call that photo that you make of this sort of still life, this lay-down, as you say, of these snippets, artfully arranged, I would also note, that’s sort of your “goal palette.” You call it like a goal palette. And it’s a great reminder because it is really hard: You go to the garden center and you have what, like a 1-by-2-inch picture or something, not even that big, picture of a plant and it’s asleep. It’s half-asleep in the pot, right? It’s tricky to know what you’re going to be getting. And so you have to have something in your mind, I think, firmly.

Stephen: And that helps with the gardener’s mindset idea as well, because all of this stuff we’re talking about is us talking about plants. Us sitting here thinking about color palettes and plant palettes and what plants have certain colors is immediately distancing our brains from our everyday issues, everyday problems, our to-do lists that we might have hanging over us. A lot of us, for me, particularly what I hate is admin stuff like, “Oh, I need to check in on that insurance. I need to make sure that this is occurring for this tax thing.”

All that stuff, all that can be swept away by these projects, and also just the news of the world and what our phones drag us into politically. It’s so great to be able to have the luxury of time and space to be able to think about something like the color of flowers.

Margaret: An antidote.

Stephen: And not everybody gets a chance to do that. So if we have an opportunity, even on a windowsill or a small condo garden, all of that is a way to find some joy.

Margaret: I wanted to just ask about something that was a real aha for me. I hadn’t really thought about it consciously: an overlooked factor about sort of how light changes throughout the day, but especially at evening. And how so many of us have a space that we may use—I believe you have a patio in your backyard where you have a dining table that you use in the summer, and beds near it. And what should go in beds that are either where we look out or whether we’re actually out in the garden in the evening, the colors and so forth. And so that was a kind of a great aha for me. Tell us a little bit about that.

Stephen: Well, I think I often had moonlight gardens in my repertoire of doing stories with magazines, or often talking about moonlight gardens. And that’s always white, but silver foliage as well help. But people tend to make these white or silver-foliage gardens for the moonlight. I discovered that blue is also a big, glowing color during the gloaming, to use that twilight phrase.

So that kind of like when I said when you scuba dive and you go deeper and deeper, all the reds and oranges and yellows go away first, and you’re left with greens and then ultimately just blues. And I think that’s what I thought of when I have this place that you want to look out at if we’re having dinner, mosquitoes permitting. If we’re having dinner outside, I want this bed—and that’s where my vision is—it’s all glowing as the sun is going down. It’s after the sun has gone down, right? And after civil twilight, you get this glow, and the blues and the whites particularly are really going. And then you head into moonlight, hopefully, and you get even more glow. So that’s the kind stuff of I love with the color stuff and planting for purpose.

Margaret: So real quick, is there anything that’s on your “I’ve got to have it” list that you’re pursuing plant-wise that’s hopefully going to find a home in your garden this spring?

Stephen: Well, I’ve fallen in love with wallflowers lately-

Margaret: Oh!

Stephen: And they used to not be around much, I felt like, but now I’m just seeing them more and more. And I love the fragrance. It’s violet fragrance, just violets, not African violets, of course, violet fragrance. So I really am interested in wallflowers and I’d like to grow a lot more. And also they have all these great brown colors.

Margaret: Right, which sort of gets back to your love of the bearded iris. That’s one place where you can find those kinds of colors as well.

Stephen: And one last thing is that, but once again, I put the wallflowers in a bed and then some blue and some white hyacinths came up next to the wallflowers, which were kind of a rusty color. And now I look at it and it looks kind of like a really off American flag.

Margaret: Oops! [Laughter.] Well, you have a shovel, Steven. You have a shovel. Don’t forget, you have a shovel. So you’re going to fix it.

So it’s really good talking to you. Thank you so much.

(Photos by Stephen Orr except portrait of him by Nancy Iacoi.)

enter to win a copy of ‘the gardener’s mindset’

I’LL BUY A COPY of ““The Gardener’s Mindset: Connecting with Nature Through Plants,”” by Stephen Orr for one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below:

Any colors you especially love or avoid in your garden, or any other color-related thoughts to share from your own experiments?

No answer, or feeling shy? Just say something like “count me in” and I will, but a reply is even better. I’ll pick a random winner after entries close at midnight Tuesday, May 12, 2026. Good luck to all.

(Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

prefer the podcast version of the show?

MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 17th year in March 2026. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the May 4, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).