GARDENING : Cultivate Harvest Home With Flaming Foliage

If your fall garden gives you the blues, the antidote is simple: Addorange.

Neither the pastels of spring nor the vibrant reds and yellows of summer cut through gray autumnal haze quite like the blaze of orange, says Ric Catron of Santa Ana Heights. In addition to his job as park planner for the city of Riverside, Catron teaches fall gardening classes at Fullerton College and for UCI Extension.

Jan Zalba of San Clemente, gardening instructor at L.A. County Arboretum and South Coast Botanical Gardens, agrees. “The eye craves burnished colors in the fall,” she says.

But, please, can’t we give the shade another name, she pleads. Pumpkin, carrot, persimmon. Ocher, sienna, copper. Anything but orange.

“The first thing you think of when you hear that word is the skin of an orange,” she complains. “And nothing in the garden is that color.”

Whatever you care to call it, orange is your color for livening up a melancholy fall landscape, these experts say. Here are some ways to add it:

Trees

If you’ve got room and don’t mind raking leaves, nothing looks more autumnal than a deciduous tree. Despite our mild weather, there are several varieties that can be relied on for good fall color in Southern California.

For the most intense red-orange leaves, choose the Chinese tallow tree (Sapium sebiferum), suggests Greg Applegate, consulting arborist at Sea Tree Nursery in Irvine. When the sun’s behind it, he says, the tree’s beautiful, heart-shaped leaves light up like neon.

Catron likes it too. “An excellent parkway tree,” he says. “Way under-utilized.”

Next in order of brilliance, says Applegate, is the crape myrtle variety called ‘Natchez.’ “When the sun shines through it, people ask, ‘What’s that blooming over there?’ ” he says.

Nyssa sylvatica (sour gum) follows closely on his list. The tree’s glossy green leaves turn an orange-splashed yellow in fall, says Applegate, and the handsome patterning of its branches and red tinge of its bark make N. sylvatica attractive even when bare.

Liquidambar ‘Palo Alto’ and Chinese pistache are two other possibilities.

To heighten the fall leaf color of any of the above, suggests Zalba, sprinkle aluminum sulfate at the base of the tree at this time of year and water it well.

The Japanese persimmon adds orange to the landscape through its fruit, which hang from the tree’s bare branches like little lanterns October through January. The red leaves that precede the fruit are pretty, too.

The persimmon is one of the nicest fruit trees around for ornamental use, Catron says. Its delicate, refined shape makes it attractive in the landscape year-round, he says. (Riverside is reintroducing this once popular street tree back into its parkways.)

Fred Springer of Villa Park, who has a 15-year-old persimmon tree near his front entrance, seconds Catron’s opinion. “It looks good in bloom, when the leaves change, and in fruit,” he says. “People always comment on it.”

Plant a non-astringent ‘Fuyu’ type, suggests Springer, and you can eat the fruit when it’s still crisp just like an apple rather than waiting until it’s soft as you must with other varieties. Persimmon fruit leather is quite tasty, too, he says, and a good way to use up excess harvest.

Shrubs

Pyracantha is the quintessential fall shrub, says Catron. Its abundant berries come in a variety of shades from yellow-orange to currant red, depending on the cultivar, and are appealing to the avian population, he says.

“It’s true--birds really do get drunk on the berries. (The berries) ferment on the branches, and birds eat them and fly into windows.”

Cape honeysuckle (Tecomaria capensis) is another justifiably popular shrub, according to Catron. It can be shaped into either a vine or a shrub; it provides excellent protection against soil erosion on banks; it’s disease-free and relatively drought-tolerant, and it provides a bounty of dark orange-red flowers from late summer through winter that hummingbirds dote on.

Chinese lantern (Abutilon) produces drooping blossoms shaped like temple bells nearly year-round, says Zalba, but she finds the orange sherbet-colored flowers particularly pleasing in the fall landscape.

Don’t forget roses, which are often at their best in Southern California this time of year, Zalba adds. Though modern hybrid teas, in particular, are available in vivid oranges, Zalba finds the apricot shades more compatible with other things in the garden.

“Apricot blends beautifully with the bronzy colors of mums and rudbeckia and is a nice contrast to salvias like ‘Indigo Spires’ and ‘Purple Majesty,’ which are at their best right now,” she says.

“And in the spring they’ll blend with pink, lavender and other pastels much easier than brighter orange roses will.”

Here are a few of her favorites:

‘Apricot Nectar’--A tall, vigorous floribunda with huge, open flowers similar to those of ‘Queen Elizabeth.’ “When I grew it, people would knock on the door to ask me what it was,” Zalba says, adding that it has a “wonderful fragrance, too.”

‘Amber Queen’--A smaller, bushier floribunda with medium-sized, golden-peach-colored blooms.

‘Brandy’--Another big, vigorous shrub with huge, open-style flowers in a honey-apricot shade. This popular hybrid tea is mildew-free, good for coastal gardens, and nicely fragrant, Zalba says.

‘Buff Beauty’--A hybrid musk that grows almost as wide as it does tall, has foliage nearly to the ground and produces abundant pale apricot flowers that look like fat powder puffs, per Zalba. “An excellent landscaping plant,” she says.

Vines

If you don’t have room to add a deciduous tree for fall leaf color, what about a vine? The leaves of the Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) turn orange to scarlet before dropping, says Catron, and the plant is smaller scale, easier to control, and has less destructive sucker discs than its cousin Boston ivy.

For orange flowers, he says, consider the Mexican flame vine (Senecio confusus). “If I had a garden instead of a patio, this is definitely a plant I would have.” The evergreen vine produces large clusters of tangerine-colored, daisy-like blossoms with contrasting golden centers. Though the plant blooms off and on all year, says Catron, its fall blossoms are the most spectacular.

Another under-utilized vine, in Catron’s opinion, is Combretum fruticosum, an L.A. Arboretum introduction. The plant produces orange bottle-brush type blossoms in fall followed by red fruit.

“The flowers are iridescent orange,” he says, “and nearly all stamens. They look like caterpillars on LSD.”

With its taste for heat, C. fruticosum, would be a good choice for a sunny inland location, suggests Catron.

Ornamental Grasses

If grass and lawn are synonymous in your vocabulary, it may surprise you to learn that grass isn’t always green. Andropogon, for instance, is blue-green spring and summer, turning to brilliant orange in the fall.

“The grass holds its orange color all winter long, and it’s wonderful to see in the garden on gray, overcast days,” says John Greenlee of Greenlee Nursery in Pomona, a wholesale ornamental grass specialist. He likes the plant’s very vertical growth habit too.

Look for big blue stem (the plant’s common name), he says, if you want a grass about three feet tall; little blue stem, if 12 to 18 inches sounds better scaled for your garden.

If you have room for an accent plant that gets five to six feet tall and nearly as wide, consider Miscanthus sinensis ‘Morning Light’, Greenlee suggests. The plant’s graceful gray-green leaves turn yellow-orange in late fall before becoming a dormant straw-color.

Perennials

You can’t have a fall garden without Asclepias tuberosa, insists Zalba, and she has a point. The narrow, upright three-foot-tall plant produces clusters of small dark-orange flowers with golden centers that attract butterflies, particularly monarchs.

“And what about orange cannas?” she adds. “They look wonderful this time of year.” ’Bengal Tiger,’ a variety with variegated foliage and especially brilliant flowers, is one of her favorites.

As you tell from this sampling, there are no shortage of orange-leafed or flowered plants available now. Nature must have known we’d be needing them. If you’ve never thought of orange as your color, give peach a chance. Or pumpkin, persimmon, kumquat or tangerine. There’s nothing better under the rainbow than these colors, say seasoned gardeners, for curing the autumn garden blues.