The freest plantings in the Goffstown gardens are the Sunset color gardens along the main porch of the museum and the Wait Station garden on the property line.
There are no rules there, no ideologies, no plant politics. No color is forbidden. I do not care if a plant comes from New Boston’s fields or Mexico’s Sierra Madre. I hold with Gertrude Jekyll, who did not care if a flower was tender or hardy as long as it is handsome and and “puts on a brave show when a brave show is wanted”. The feral orange daylilies bloom on the verges of the garden, for I have no quarrel with them. There are the new persicarias from European gardens and the balsams and petunias from the old days. Colors mingle and though certain jolting colors suddenly appear, it is in general, a peaceable kingdom.
Louise Beebe Wilder wrote that too many rules and too much timidity about color leads to a “wearisome suavity”. To my mind peonies and iris and Shasta daisies are the expected “Dream Garden”, not the Dream garden of the mysterious, and the fanciful and the unexpected. Give me the shrub fuschias and sherbet colored cannas. Let me never fear the colors of red or yellow or the speedy spread of our native hardy ageratum.
Gardening On Granite 