Gorgeous Yellow-and-Blue Plantings

To get your imagination going, take a look at nine ideas from gardens that embrace this color pairing. We’ve also included a reference list of garden favorites that feature yellow and blue flowers or foliage.

1. Watercolor palette. In this meadow garden in Malvern, Pennsylvania, landscape designer Donald Pell paired yellow-flowering prairie rosinweed (Silphium terebinthinaceum), native to Midwestern prairies, with the purple-blue ‘Blue Fortune’ hyssop (Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’), pale blue ‘Filigran’ Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia ‘Filigran’) and ornamental grasses to create a beautiful and pollinator-friendly garden.

Massing the flowers and grasses into swaths emphasizes the different colors and forms of the plants. The result is a garden that looks as soothing as a watercolor painting.

Plants to the left of the path: Prairie rosinweed (Silphium terebinthinaceum), autumn moor grass (Sesleria autumnalis) and ‘Filigran’ Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia ‘Filigran’); plants on the right: ‘Blue Fortune’ hyssop (Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’) and ‘Karl Foerster’ feather reed grass (Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’)

Did you notice how Pell mapped out the plantings so a purple- or blue-flowering plant is always next to a swath of a yellow-flowering, yellow-green or bronze foliage plant? This arrangement helps show off the contrast between the yellow and lavender hues.

2. Spring container. The yellow-lavender color pairing is seen here in a sweet entryway container filled with miniature daffodils, fragrant hyacinth and bicolored yellow, lavender and lavender-orange violas. Including a darker purple hyacinth in the arrangement deepens the palette and helps make the yellows and pastel purples stand out.

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3. Geometric meadow. This low-water planting in a Berkeley, California, garden contains Spanish lavender (Lavandula stoechas), two types of lavender cotton (Santolina chamaecyparissus) and pops of purple allium, pairing lavender and yellow in a fresh way.

Plantings are kept formal and geometric, with the green and silver lavender cotton planted on a grid and allium coming up between the mounds. As more plants bloom, the contrast between the yellow flowers and silver-blue foliage and lavender will be even more pronounced.

4. Carefree pathway. Here we see two of the same plant types from the previous image, but with a very different result. In this London garden the plantings are informal, and the English lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) and yellow-flowering lavender cotton (Santolina chamaecyparissus) billow over the flagstone stepping stones leading to the seating area mixed with Latin American fleabane (Erigeron karvinskianus).

5. Low-water Mediterranean. This Mediterranean-style garden in Central California’s Santa Ynez Valley makes use of primarily drought-friendly plants, including a pleasing pairing of purple-blue pride of Madeira (Echium candicans) and yellow-flowering Jerusalem sage (Phlomis fruticosa). The side-by-side planting emphasizes the complementary colors.

In a different shot of the same garden, the yellow of the Jerusalem sage plays off the silver-blue of an agave and ground cover plants, such as blue fescue (Festuca glauca) and silver carpet (Dymondia margaretae), as well as the blue shutters.

7. Sunny perennials. Pollinator magnets Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) and black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) make a classic summer pairing of lavender blue and golden yellow. Both plants have long bloom times that will carry gardens from summer into fall.

9. Natural meadow. Complementary colors often show up side by side in nature in the blooms of wildflowers or other native plants. In gardens, if you have one native species, show off the bloom color by planting another native or garden-friendly ornamental in a complementary hue.

Yellow buttercups and blue-purple small camas (Camassia quamash), also called wild hyacinth, form a perfect pair in this maintained meadow in West Dean, England. Many species of buttercup are native to the meadows and wetlands of the U.K., while the camas is an introduced plant from North America.