What’s Blooming This Summer

The Central Garden is bursting with color this summer.

When Robert Irwin designed Getty’s Central Garden, he split it into sections with distinct color palettes. Rich greens, browns, and violets with deep red accents complement the reddish-brown Carnelian granite walls.

Venture south and the colors grow more vibrant, with, as Irwin described it: “sharp magenta-to-red accents” to the west and “blue, blue-violet, and violet-with-orange accents” to the east.

“Sometimes it can get to being almost too much,” Irwin said about the garden’s intensity in 2002. “It can really rattle your teeth, which has indeed unnerved some of the garden critics but was exactly the kind of abandon I was aiming for.”

Getty horticulturist, Jackie Flor, said that Irwin’s design “gives you a reason to walk the whole garden.”

Blooms, Blooms, and More Blooms!

Each summer, Getty’s Garden and Grounds team plants a lavish array of dahlias that exemplify an almost overwhelming display of color and diversity.

This year, Flor selected 57 varieties of dahlias with blooms ranging from two inches to 12-inch “dinner-plate size” flowers.

The dahlias bloom all summer. While they were planted in late May, many of the smaller flowers began blooming in mid-June, and some larger buds are just now opening up.

A Close Look at Some Favorites

Walk the garden and you’ll encounter Bed Head, Karma Lagoon, Spartacus, and Spoiled Rotten varietals, to name a few.

Not Just Dahlias

Dahlias aren’t the only flowers flourishing this summer. Here are some of Flor’s favorites to look out for while wandering through the garden.

Arrive early to enjoy the intoxicating fragrance of the Angel’s Trumpets. It dissipates by noon.

Both red and blue delphiniums are found throughout the garden. The name delphinium derives from the ancient Greek word delphion, meaning dolphin, because of the fin-like shape of the plant.

Look up and you’ll see that each trellis boasts a different plant.

For Irwin, each trellis was a door to a new room, dividing areas of the garden and “holding chaos at bay.”

Flor said Munstead Wood is one of the most beautifully fragrant roses. The deep hues of the petals are a fan favorite amongst the Getty grounds staff.

The tiny buds of the English daisies open up in the afternoon sun and close again each evening as the sun sets.

Flor’s team grew the garden’s cosmos from seeds. If you’d like to add more blooms to your own garden, Flor said that cosmos are an excellent choice for beginners.

Whether a hydrangea’s bloom color is blue or pink is generally determined by soil pH, so Flor’s team applied the appropriate fertilizer to each side of the garden to encourage and deepen the hues.

Alkaline soil with a pH about 7.0 promotes pink and red blooms, while an acidic soil with a pH lower than 6.0 yields blue or lavender-blue petals.