well for me, these things are rarely planned, they sort of emerge over time. Anyhow, this year, I found myself sowing a lot of white flowers (gypsophila, orlaya, white evening primroses, zaluzynskya,several types of nicotiana even white caifornian poppies). The biennials and perennials for next year(canterbury bells, foxgloves, balladonna delphinium and myosotis) are also white so I am going with the trend. I am going to strip out a lot of my garden, enlarge the beds, move the pergola and sort out some decent hard standing - all this in a tiny 6mx8m approx. space.(what is left after the greenhouse has taken loads of space - I have a 10ftx12ft one so nice and roomy) Mainly because my garden at home is essentially layers and layers of wall climbers (roses, solanum, honeysuckle, iochroma, clems) which almost meet as a canopy over the entire garden. In all this green shade, colours got a bit lost whereas white, even just flashes of it ALWAYS seem to look lovely. I will allow lilacs and purples and have what is often called in the US, a moon garden. Especially good because the garden is west facing and is in shade anyway until afternoon.
I should say that I had a bit of a rose lay-off from 2004-8 when it was all about my allotment and lots more space so I went a bit mad with alpine areas, scree gardens, gravel gardens, late summer borders, dahlia borders....oh yeah, a few veggies too. However, I had to replace a lot of virused raspberries and the only available space was what used to be a 'meadow'. This area is now roses and raspberries and I am going to carry on with mainly whites and creams. It is such a unifying look because I also have some fantastic grasses, such as arundo donax and variagated miscanthus so I am hoping for a lot of green with frothy whites, floating very loosely. White cosmos and agrostemma self seed every year and with white and lilac sweet peas, I think I will get the look I want but it is not going to be a collection of lots of white plants, rather more greens with white highlights.
I am really loving the idea of grasses and roses (also I added an exochorda and a couple of deutzias and 2 philadelphus). Hoping that everything is at least 1m tall, has a lot of movement and avoids big clumps or lumps and no soil visible anywhere (although I have half a dozen box balls ready to plant (only took 5 years to get 30cm across! ha ha)
The whole green and white thing has been done to death so I really want a wilder, more contemporary look (hence the pimpinellifolias and persian musk rose) than anything remotely formal - lots of moondaisies and cowparsley in the mix as well. It could be terrific....or it could be a total mess.
Believe it or not, I am also pressing for a conifer revival - i know we have all been put off after seeing so many conifer and heather beds in the 70's but this is, i think, to miss a trick since some of the pinus and piceas are fantastic plants with strength and character - thinking picea pungens would be a good background, or even an atlantic cedar.mmmmmm, getting excited again after August blues with the hellcat and idle offspring. Even better news, I have got the youngest ingrate a job....YES! a job with a tree surgeon. 7.15am starts...ho ho. So, just come back from a garden centre (oh, surprise, came home with another grass (molinia)and a spindle tree (euonymous alata compacta - a lovely small shrub with the most amazing autumn colouring I have ever seen - deep, deep cerise pink with a strange corky bark - feeling all hopeful and optimistic again.
Oh yeah, I got a whole load of roundup to blitz the next plot slacker's weeds - I love autumn, it really is the start of the gardening year for me. New bulbs, cutting back and clearing, leaf collecting, planting and dividing, sowing for next year. Oh yes, bring it on.

Campanula- It sounds like you have wonderful plans for your garden spaces :)

I like your idea for a conifer revival. It will provide a lot more four season interest. It was overdone in the 1970s, but I think it's time to bring them back.

That sounds lovely campanula, I somehow ended up with quite a few white blooming red leaf plants, not sure though where I will eventually stick all of them: Clematis recta `Purpurea` , "Husker red" penstemon, aquilegia "Black Barlow" also fits the whole set, as well as some late autumn asters, white malvas, etc. Very happy with Clematis 'Guernsey Cream' also, it has that old parchment tan to it, which makes it look like a real flower rather than fake papery thing like many white large flower clematis tend to have.

If you go for white-green look, tulip "Exotic Emperor" is a must have, large blousy flowers with the green stripes, most retailer photos do not do it justice.

To think about it, I do not have that many white roses, somehow orange autumny tans is what I look at most this season. My Park Alley lavatera hybrid looks splendid with dark orange-black sunflowers and same tan rudbekias - I want more of that! Ordered Summer Song and Lady of Shallott, as well as weird older HT Thais for that corner, with Crepuscule for the background, maybe it will work, maybe not. :D

Good luck with the cat, we are leaving our Siamese home alone (with the other cat of course) for a couple of days next week, so that will be "I pee on everything you own" kind of thing... sigh...

funnily enough, I do have the white Fosteriana tulip, Purissima and have looked at exotic emperor instead of Spring Green. I have a lot of triandrus narcissi also (Thalia, Tresemble, Petrel etc)- they are fairly late with lovely drooping heads. I do love those warm orangey tones too - a lot of customers are very anti-orange and one garden i work on only has pale pinks, purples, whites and blues - no yellows, reds or oranges. Very meh, to my mind as they won't even allow primrose whereas I absolutely love deep reds, plums, purples to contrast quite sharply with orange, scarlets and acid greens and yellows. I think it does depend a lot of light and shade too. Hot colours just look murky unless they are in sun and have some space to grow in - they just shout a bit loudly in the foreground otherwise. Conversely, the pale pastels can fade away into vagueness and dull 'good taste' if they are used as background colours. These fads and whims come and go though. I find myself liking plants which, only a few years earlier, would have been dismissed out of hand. I like to try different things so thankfully, having a greenhouse means I can propagate a lot of stuff myself and just replant entirely new areas in one season. On the other hand, there is a distinctly unfinished air about both my gardening areas. Still, the only thing worse than having a half-done garden would be to have a finished one. What then?
Oh dear, cats are so emphatic with their gestures of disapproval - my daughters cat can get a massive cob on for DAYS when she will rip and rend everything she can get her teeth into (Bra straps and knickers are a speciality). Hope you manage a good break though.

White gardens are especially rewarding for those who work away from home during the day and can only see their gardens in the evening. Except in midsummer that means the lower light levels where white gardens just glow. In the full glare of the midday sun I find them to be less effective, which may be why I found Vita Sackville-West's famous White Garden a bit disappointing when I visited it some years ago. Or it may have been that having heard it praised for many years, it had no chance to be as beautiful as the white garden of own my imagination.

I actually preferred the purple border in the first courtyard at Sissinghurst. After I came home I spent a few years trying my hand at an interpretation of that bed. I used a palette of plants that would grow well in my own climate Unfortunately the result was just what Gertrude Jeckyll predicted. VSW I am not.

Gardens exalt us. They also make us humble.

I'd love to see some pictures of these two white gardens when you are ready to share. Or have you already posted them elsewhere and I missed them?

Rosefolly

No, I have'nt done them yet - well not properly anyway. My home garden has been full for a long time so i really just shoehorn bits and pieces in every year but I really will try to get to grips with this photo thing - some of the ones on this forum are stunning. My revamped allotment section has just had its first season so the new bit - about 6m x 10m - has roses (which are not all white: Jaqueline du Pre, Moonlight, Phillippa renaissance, Sophie's perpetual, Jude the Obscure, Pat Austin, Snowgoose,Hebe's Lip), sweet peas, cosmos, gyp, siberian iris, scabious ochraleuca, penstemons, geraniums, millium, hakenochloa, and thalictrum delavayi, miscanthus variagata and silberfeder, campanula lactiflora, persiciflora and trachelium, nemesia and foxgloves but is still gappy and bitty because the plants are still young and need space to grow. I think next year will start to look a bit better especially since the raspberries will provide a deep green background.
You are right about timing as well as context Rosefolly - that evening twilight is a terrific time for white and lavender/purple plants and as an extra bonus, so many of them have evening fragrance too. I agree absolutely about Sissinghurst, in fact, I find a lot of these grand gardens to be contrived and often lacking in soul. I don't mind my plants growing askew and I am OK with a few weeds too - daisies, silene, feverfew,buttercups are generally fairly welcome. The effect, at least in my gardens, can look stunning for a few weeks but can also look quite dreadful, only a month or so later. Not much continuity but I don't mind the tatty times (well, not too much) as long as I can have the occasional heart-stopping moment of beauty. We always live in hope and anticipation though, don't we.

I think what a lot of grand gardens lack is usability. I mean, they are designed for passing crowds, but that is completely different purpose than for example morning coffee drinking corner in a private garden. Grand estate gardens more often are a park rather than a garden.

I think the most overrated garden ever is Versailles, a lot of green meatballs and boredom all over it.

I agree with Elemire about Versailles. I found it rather boring. Impressive, and I respect the effort, but for me the result was not worth it. Maybe if I were strolling around in panniers and a silk gown I would see the point.

I can think of public gardens that I love. Many of the British National Trust gardens give me great pleasure, but then, they began as private gardens.

My favorite gardens of all are the private gardens of talented, dedicated gardener friends of mine. Really. There are some stunning, world-class gardens produced by people right here on Gardenweb.

Rosefolly

OMG Versailles - ever been inside? a monument to overweening ego and a study in vulgarity. Even allowing for period and context, the mirror hall really speaks to a perverse will to power. Quite lurid.

Touring Versailles I really came to understand how it is that many incredibly admirable objects of beauty, craftsmanship, and ingenuity, added together, can result in one really dreadful, vulgar thing.

And touring Versailles, I also understood why the French Revolution took place.

All in all, that day was quite an education.

But I loved the cathedral at Chartres.

Rosefolly

Heavens, Suzy, you're making me want to think about white gardens again, when the garden I already have is buried in bindweed. Bad Suzy! I've been in a really vile mood lately on account of the blazing sun and humid, oppressive heat and the unusually obnoxious mosquitoes and flies. They're laughable compared to what folks in the U.S. experience, but then we don't have screens or air conditioning either. I've dealt with the discomfort by staying indoors as much as possible, in the cave of the ground floor of our house, and taking frequent cool showers, but am still looking forward with passionate expectation to the almost chilly weather that's supposed to arrive Saturday night, and high time, too. I do want to get out in the garden. Anyway, your project sounds great: good luck! I need more outdoor seating myself. Have a great fall!
Melissa

Melissa, can you answer me this - WHY do Europeans not have screens??? DH and I spent an evening in hell - well, actually, in Florence - when the lovely hotel room that faced the garden was invaded by hordes of mosquitoes. I'll never forget him standing on the bed, shoe in hand, madly swatting at them. The next morning, we moved to a room that faced the street.

I dragged DH and DS around Versailles on a day that the fountains were going - not all at once, due to insufficient water pressure (the servants would run ahead of the king to turn them on, and woe to them when he would change his mind and go another direction). It was very hot, and my guys were exhausted. The garden is much nicer when the fountains are going. I do like it in all of its vulgarity and French need to trim and subdue every living thing. I love the vista on the steps, would adore paddling around on the lake, and think that Marie Antoinette's faux farm is charming.

As Rosefolly said, some of the public gardens that I visited in England were originally private. I've been reading about Hidcote, trying to make sense of what I saw, and realize how different it would have been with the neighbor's children swimming in the pool, and with cushions on the steps of Mrs. Winthrop's Garden overlooking the view (I adored the yellow and blue scheme of that garden very much). The Red Border was much more effective than VSW's purple garden, I thought. Today, Hidcote is just a place for all of us visitors to go through - once, it was somebody's home and obsession.

White gardens? In the heat and glare of Sacramento, I'm all for colors that don't fade - although some white glimmering in the evening is fine.
Anita

ah yes, Ingrid and Anita have got it bang on, background, geography and climate has the greatest effect on colours. despite the huge fashion for tropical plantings, they rarely look great under cool northern skies. Daisy's beautiful photos of neighbourhood plantings in Crete display the scarlet pelargoniums and begonias which look so brilliant with the deep blue mediterranean skies and adobe/stucco houses. Ingrid, your buddlejas are so appropriate against the misty hills because the colours and the distance and the light all merge together so that boundaries are dissolved, all becoming one.
Elemire, I found I could only really indulge myself with dark and rich colours when I got the open sunny allotment. Deep reds, blues, bronze leaves etc, actually disappear in my shady green garden at home but in the sun, they really glow. One of my absolute favourite plants is Cercis canadensis, Forest Pansy - this is beautiful at every stage, from bare dark winter stems, purple pea flowers in spring, then tiny crimson heart leaves, getter larger and bronzer working up to a fabulous autumn flush - I have it next to R.moyesii with perovskia in front and also deep pink pyrethrum in June. With the evening sun behind them, this is my favourite vista in the whole allotment......but it all depends on the position of the sun or it would be dull, leaden and drab.

Anita,
It's a mystery to me. We actually had screens made for our house once, then found out that the window openings weren't perfectly rectangular, and mounting screens on a three-story house has its difficulties. You've seen the bead curtains over front doors? I think they're supposed to keep out the bugs. We eventually gave up on screens, though I do wonder whether wise marketing of American-style screen doors couldn't work wonders in Italy. Most years insects aren't as much of a problem as this year. Along with the regular mosquitoes we have a half-sized kind I've never seen before, with a nasty bite. There are also pockets of tiger mosquitoes in the region, but I haven't seen any. The flies usually are at their worst as fall gets closer and the cold weather arrives--and of course we live next to a dairy farm, with mountains of manure--but this year they're obnoxious even in the heat.
Melissa

'found out the window openings weren't perfectly rectangular' LOL, the great european building calamities live on everywhere. My sweetheart was a builder and it is a well known phenomenon that 90 degrees does not exist as a measurement in english or continental houses. This is what a lump hammer is for.

It's not limited to the Old World, Suzy. Our former house in Olympia, Washington, though in many respects an attractive place, was evidently built without the employment of a level. I never realized it until I had a window installed in a bathroom and saw the slightly, but visibly, cockeyed results.
Melissa

I grew up in northern Sweden where every house had mosquito screens, made to measure. I have frames and netting in the basement in my present home in the south but we never assembled the screens. It seems that neither flies nor mosquitoes get into the houses as much as up north or perhaps we've less of them here. Not that I think so, I get bitten something terrible early in the season which is why I will never get a pond.

Suzy, I am fervently jotting down the names of all your white flowers, My husband and I decided only this afternoon to extend a small rose planting of Quatre saisons blanc mousseux and La neige on either side of a fallen cherry tree and add some white perennials and one grass, Calamagrostis acutiflora Karl Foerster' because it is upright.

oh, Marianne, please try nicotiana suaveolens - this was new to me after pilfering seeds from our botanical gardens last year. Unlike other Nicotianas, it has single elegant tubular flowers (although several grow along each thin and wiry stem) which easily grow 1m high and has a powerful scent for such dainty blooms - can send you some seeds if you like as I will certainly be saving more and growing them again. Not even sure whether it is annual or perennial (annual, I would guess, certainly flowers first year from a March sowing and is still flowering now) but, with tall pennisetum, this has been a revelation for me this year. Do let me know and I will send you my e.mail address- i think we could get away with a few little seeds, don't you? I can't seem to change my details on 'my page' which has not been updated since 2003. I believe the N.suaveolens would look lovely with the calamagrostis and. although the seed is tiny, it is easy like all nicotianas. There is also a small limnanthes (poached egg plant) which comes in just white (meringue, i think it is called from Thompson and Morgan or Chilterns seeds)which made a delightful edging and a change from the ubiquitous alyssum. There is also a much smaller foxglove (instead of D.purpurea alba) called snow thimbles (Nicky's seeds) which is perennial for me and only grows to 90cm. Oh, also another annual, omphalodes linifolia, almost cloudy grey with glaucous leaves, will seed around too. What a lovely project, will look forward to hearing about your successful and glowing scene. Ooops, fogetting the wonderful campanula persicifolia - brilliant plant with lovely evergreen rosettes - although I am sure you probably have these.