The Color of Brick and Your Flowers

I’ve seen a lot of interest in trying to choose attractive plantings for a brick home. This is related to the general choices of creating harmony between the house and the landscape. Just as certain garden styles match certain architecture, so certain colors of bloom and foliage best accentuate certain house materials.

In this case the challenge before us is how to best showcase a brick home?
Start with the interior advice of BH&G

That reminds us that brick comes in various colorings and shades, and that ideal harmonies of flowering plants will try to be good companions to those basic tones inside the brick. There are orange bricks, rose bricks, yellow bricks, each attractive with the other, and giving a hint of what colors might well be used with a brick house exterior. Yellows, white, creams, warm rose and apricots, plus the complementary blues and dusky purple may all be safely chosen. Where the most offense is taken is usually in trying to match up a magenta purple or pink (one of the most common of flower hues) with the brown and orange tones of bricks. It isn’t that it can’t be done, but it would be very tricky to come off well.

I guess one consideration is whether the emotional tone you desire from your front entrance facing the public would be of circus-happy wild colors or a more inviting gracious entry? Maybe your personality is best expressed with a circus barker’s podium, but perhaps that is not what you want for the enticement of buyers for your home. It depends on more than one factor.

A brick exterior is already a strong color statement, it already has the emotional expression of warm earth and solid partnership with natural materials, so it is best set off with like expressions of plant colors.

Plant Colors I Like With Brick

• achilleas of all types have beautiful yellow, cream, rose, and brick colors
• butterfly asclepsias
• most astilbes except the strongest deep rose colors
• orange-red,salmon and white geraniums
• rudbeckias and galliardias are exceptional choices
• soft yellowish greens in lady’s mantle, rue, or trailing helichrysums
• silver, pinks, and purples can be found in many plant choices. Artemisias, Russian sage, salvias for a rose brick, but not for strong orange brick
• citrus colors for orange brick:lime,clear yellow, bright orange: coleus, big orange and lime zinnias, marigolds
• goldflame spirea, golden leaved evergreens, coral colored shrub roses

*subdued or gray shades in flowers are colors we describe as “dusty”, artemisias are gray or silver foliaged plants, and Achillea millefolium, a type of yarrow, has dusty shades in the newer hybrids like the ‘Summer Pastels Series’. This is a plant easily grown from seed or increased by division of the plants.

Photo credit: gracey from morguefile.com

Photo credit for top right: kevinrosseel from morguefile.com