Every year the hugely influential trend team at Pantone decide on a key colour, one that reflects leading fashion and style trends, and also one that reflects our current emotional mood.
These colour trends show up in our homes, our cars, our clothes - and our gardens.
For 2023, Pantone has selected a dark raspberry red, which they call Viva Magenta.
The deep rich colour is, in Pantone's words :
""a balance between warm and cool, rooted in the primordial
...inspired by the red of cochineal, one of the most precious dyes ...as well as one of the strongest and brightest the world has known.""
Viva Magenta Plants
Viva Magenta is a colour that works beautifully in gardens, for flowers and for foliage.
The colour is strong enough to stand alone, and gentle enough to complement other garden plants.
We've selected some plant to give you the Viva Magenta look in your own back yard. For instant on-trend garden style, plant these and you'll be instantly stylish in 2023!
Viva Magenta : Key Foliage Plants
There are a few families of favourite garden plants that are made for this colour trend - and surprisingly, most are foliage plants, not flowering plants! For subtropical and frost-free gardens,
Acalypha Inferno and
Firestorm make fast-growing informal hedges full of fiery colour, living up to their names. Groundcover foliage favourite
Alternanthera - especially
Brazilian Red Hots,
Purple Splash, and
Fire Bug varieties - will look like a lake of lava, planted en masse.
The leaf colour is strongest in new leaves, so regular clipping will enhance it; plant where the sunlight can shine through the leaves too, to maximise the colour impact.
Always a popular feature plant for subtropical spaces and indoor decoration,
Cordylines bring the bright colour wherever they are planted. Some of the best and brightest for Viva Magenta moods are
Firestorm,
Purple Prince,
John Klass Red,
Ruby, and
Dr Brown.
Hedging favourite
Photinia is a winner when it comes to warm magenta red colour - they are especially bright after a close clipping when the new leaves start to emerge.
Glabra Rubens is the brightest and most vibrant,
Pink Marble gives you the widest range of pink-purple-red shades, and
Red Robin is the most adaptable to grow.
Equally popular as hedging plants, especially for smaller gardens and for shorter hedges,
Nandina gives you changing rainbows of colour through every month of the year, as temperatures change. And in many months, that colour is a spicy warm red or a rich wine burgundy - perfect for this trend. For the reddest shades, choose Ozbreed's trio of petite plants :
Obsession,
Flirt, and
Blush
There's vibrant colour to be had at a smaller scale too, indoors and outside.
Heucheras and heucherellas are fantastic foliage plants for sun and shade, frost-hardy, and heat-tolerant if they get enough water. New varieties are being bred with intense colouration, like
Forever Red above. Peep under the leaves of a
prayer plant and you'll get a pop of purple colour! Whether it's ripple-leaved
rattlesnake plant, soft-to-touch
velvet calathea, beautifully-patterned
Calathea Medallion (shown above) or elegant
Ctenanthe Grey Star, they all give you surprise colour and lots of foliage interest all year round.
And talking of colour - we can't go past the amazing
Rex begonias when it comes to full-on colourful leaves. They all put on a show, but the most Viva-Magenta-esque varieties are the glowing all-over-magenta
Red Robin, iridescent large-leaved
Ruby Slippers, shimmering sparkling
Kotobuki; and
Painter's Palette, magenta strikingly contrasting with white and green.
Viva Magenta : Key Flowering Plants
Want still more Viva Magenta plants to add bright warm colour to your back yard? You got it! There's lots of choice, especially in small shrubs.
One of the best plants that comes immediately to mind when thinking about magenta flowers is
Leptospermum, or native tea tree. So many favourite varieties have intensely wine-red flowers, often set against deep dark foliage for added contrast. Our favourites above include double-flowered
Burgundy Queen, plum-leaved
Kiwi, petite favourite
rubrum nana, and new variety
Rudolph
When you think of grevilleas you might imagine the larger bush type flowers, in shades of peach and yellow. But the groundcover Grevilleas are deeper and darker in colour, with bronze-red leaves and cherry-purple flowers.
We have a range of varieties that rotate through the year, all extremely popular for Aussie gardens nationwide, including :
Fanfare,
Royal Mantle,
Carpet Layer,
Bronze Rambler, and
Flat Az.If you want height in your native garden, grevilleas can provide that -
Ivanhoe and
Poorinda Splendour (shown above) might not be as well-known as other garden varieties, but they are both striking plants, generous with their dark magenta-red flowers, and worth a place in the border.
On the exotic side of the garden, there's plenty of space for Viva Magenta to shine. We've selected anthurium
Anouk with its unusual purple-pink flowers; callistemon
Genoa Glory, blooming in wine-purple bottlebrushes, rather than the more common red; petite sun-loving rocker plant
red saxifrage; and bold leucadendrons -
Amethyst and
Cheeky have especially deep colour.
We hope this has given you some ideas for using and combining Viva Magenta plants in your garden. Why don't you give one of them a go for 2023?
