Plant Couture & This Year's Hottest Color
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With 2024 coming to an end and 2025 on its heels, when better to prepare you for the next annual color palette than now? Pantone has officially released its Color of the Year for 2025: now introducing Mocha Mousse. |
Warming and comforting, earthy and grounding yet light and airy, Mocha Mousse is a fully encompassing hue of many different lifestyles and aesthetic choices. How, you might ask yourself, does one incorporate a color that works spectacularly in haute couture, into the green industry? Specifically, a color that is nonetheless typically associated with autumnal decay in the eyes of plant-blind onlookers? How do you intrigue, surprise, and delight in the home garden or broader landscape with such a color while bypassing the immediate prejudice of “brown = dead”?
While it is easy for many people to associate the brown seedheads of spent plants with the cold, dreary winter months, it’s our job as landscape and horticulture professionals to re-frame these earthy tones as representatives of evoking the cozy, familial feelings of drinking hot, whipped mocha mousse hot chocolate near the fireplace in a favorite blanket, watching snow fall through the winter winds to accessorize the abundant soft browns of the landscape.
Some of these are familiar favorites that have been harped on during the growing season, and some even fairly recently (looking at you, Equisetum hyemale).
But this week, we implore you to look through the mocha-mousse-colored lens with brand new eyes at these selections.
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The bronzing of semi-evergreen and evergreen plant material is a natural process meant as a protective physiological response to cold temperatures, wind, and other inclement winter conditions. While bronzed foliage often remains more attractive for longer periods, these are also plant parts that will eventually dehisce to give way to new growth. In evergreen conifers, this is known as “needle shedding”, while in semi-evergreen groundcovers such as the above-pictured Viola walteri ‘Silver Gem’, this bronzing is definitive of the first plant parts to die back before re-flushing new growth. A lack of chlorophyll production during winter months allows these alternate pigments to truly shine in all their glory, giving many landscapes second life long after the growing season. The warm brown seedheads of Spiraea japonica ‘Neon Flash’ may not be the selling point of this traditional landscape plant, but they are certainly a key winter feature if left to persist. Normalize planting shrubs for their winter appearance as well as their growing season splendor!Evergreen Doesn’t Always Mean Always “Green”.In fact, some of our favorite winter selections are known to take on bronzed colors this time of year, from coppery-browns to greenish-purples, and a dash of mocha mousse intermingling amongst them. Wetland native Equisetum hyemale is a prime example of this winter appearance: its verdant green stalks become enrobed by rich, warm brown tones in the cooler months, ranging from chestnut to sienna to russet to, you guessed it, mocha mousse. A fantastic and unexpected selection for winter containers to provide height and vertical structure, Equisteum hyemale is steadfast, low maintenance, and perfect for surprising onlookers during even the coldest months.
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Viola walteri 'Silver Gem'