Adding color to my garden

Shocking right?

Well, not as shocking as this photo...

After visiting my friend Heather's garden last summer, I returned home thinking "I need more color!" Heather is a self identified Flower Floozy so color comes naturally to her garden, and she does it well. I don't swing that way, so I needed to come up with a different idea to incorporate more color. That's when I hatched a plan to paint the side of our neighbor's garage the same orange as our shade pavilion. Their garage is the north border to the upper section of our back garden. Here's another look at the brown...
And the shade pavilion...
A progress shot, there was so much scraping of peeling paint!!!
And the orange after...
I wanted to love it. I was pretty sure I was gonna love it. But I stepped back after the first coat was complete, and, well, I did not love it. I started second guessing my choice. The other contender was something along these lines, the chartreuse wall in Marcia Donahue's Berkeley garden.
But I wanted something that made the foliage POP! I was afraid a lot of it would get lost in front of a green wall.
And since what flowers I do have in this part of the garden tend towards orange, like this, my orange edgeworthia (Edgeworthia chrysantha ‘Akebono’)...
Which is covered in these bright flowers every spring...
And these nearby orange crocosmia that have been threatening to open since the day I started painting (do it already!)...
And these, which have been blooming for weeks...
Well orange just seemed like the way to go. 

So what don't I like? Well the brown wall kind of disappeared, it receded. The orange wall makes the space feel smaller. Plus, since the other boundary walls around the lower back garden are all unpainted fences like this section behind the shade pavilion...

They now look naked. The old brown continued the color theme and your eye didn't stop to take in the slight contrast. The new orange is a definite difference. Oh, and yes, the shade pavilion looks a little dingy by comparison, it's going to get a refresh just as soon as I have a free couple of days. It hasn't been repainted since we built it, back in 2009—13 years ago now!

I've had a few friends over in the week since completing the project, and they've all given it a thumbs up. A couple of them have walked right by without even noticing it, so I guess it's not as shocking as I initially thought. 

As for me, I'm still surprised when I see it, unexpectedly, as I move through the garden, and discovering the changes in color during different times of the day and lighting conditions, but I'm starting to love it.