a color story: lonely red tulip and the yellow daffodil

In the garden bed, a single red tulip appeared with a bundle of yellow daffodils.

Why did this look so good? Did the tulip allude to the time I buried it knowing that it will be an odd look. Was it an experiment to see whether tulips look good as a complementary plant? Was it the ratio of 10 daffodils to a single red tulip?

Why did this "mistake" catch my attention?

Planting flowers served an aesthetic reason. If done well, they transformed an environment from dullness to an aesthetic one. I dwelled deeper into this world by reading gardening books and blogs. Latin names. Perennials vs Annuals. Hardiness Zones. Rock gardening. Perennial Planting. Horticulture Architects. Pruning. Edging. Mulching. Soil conditions. I felt like I've only touched the surface on the topic. 

Complementary planting was another category. Combining plants sounded obvious. But, I never applied the basic concepts intentionally. I remembered reading a section about a classic pair- daffodils and tulips. 

Seeing them in a book and seeing them in real life were two completely different experience. It made sense theoretical via pages. But, witnessing the two plants as a whole in real life felt surreal. The color combination of primary colors (that seemed obvious) impacted my views on gardening's potential. Once you do all the grunt work, one created a canvas with the gardening soil. Then, the fun started. 

Claude Monet, the impressionist French painter, quoted

"My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece". 

I never viewed flowers as an acrylic to the soil/canvas. The flower, however, was a delicate paint with its own constraints; it did not behave like acrylic. Flowers were its own medium. 

When I "painted" with a tulip and daffodils, it create a higher state of orange. Obviously, you can't create orange with the two plants. But, the plants left an invisible version of orange. 

Was this how painters viewed colors? If so, what an eye? what a perspective with the constraints of plants? Creating a higher state of a color using a medium's constraint (e.g. an impression). 

I returned to the garden bed. I saw all of the daffodils. The single tulip was there. What a lesson to combine complimentary plants. What a lovely way to view aesthetics; observing the impression, not the colors.  

The complementary plants was my first gardening painting lesson.