Buttermilk Yellow: the Garden Color to Covet in March

Spring, glorious spring! It’s so wonderful to see nature wake up in our gardens, and the color I’m happiest to see in March is a bright buttermilk yellow that’s as warm and hopeful as these newly sunny days. Because it’s not just home interiors and fashion collections that have seasonal color palettes – our gardens do, too, and I love to follow Mother Nature’s lead and highlight whatever hue is at its fabulous, flowery height.

I theme my successional planting around monthly colors, so the garden cycles through a stylish rainbow of tones as the seasons shift. It gives me the perfect excuse to shop for a low-cost addition to highlight the accent color, too.

For March, I’m diving into the splashes of buttery yellow that are already blooming abundantly in my garden.

The show got off to a strong start with wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox), bursting with scented yellow flowers since last month. These are tough shrubs, their bijou blooms laughing in the face of bad weather, and all the prettier for flowering on bare stems. It’s joined in March by Forsythia, and ‘Spring Glory’ is a particularly free-flowering variety, available from Nature Hills. With a spectrum of soft to rich yellows, it’s spring on a stick.

I prefer subtle drifts of daffodils, so I choose cultivars with pale flowers that announce spring’s arrival with a whimsical whisper rather than shouting it loud. While you can’t plant Narcissus bulbs now, you can bookmark some beauties to order for fall planting, so you get a glorious show next spring. Petite and perfectly formed, ‘Hawera’, available from Burpee is my forever favorite with six-inch blooms in the loveliest of lemon shades. They look stunning mixed with taller ‘Regeneration’, also available from Burpee, which have creamy white trumpets surrounded by a halo of light yellow, in generous clusters of 3–5 flowers on each stem.

Let's Get Growing

You can pick up cheap pots of sunny yellow crocus and violas at the grocery store, and these provide valuable nectar for early-flying bees when little else is available. Violas are easy to grow from seed, too, and ‘Lemon Chiffon’ is hardy enough to be perennial in Zones 3–9: you can start seeds, available from Amazon, indoors now. Do leave a few dandelions in your lawn for the bees, too, at least until plenty of other flowers are out in your yard.

Another way to get a lovely burst of mellow yellow tones is to sow some hardy annuals that will shrug off the cold. ‘Alba’ California poppies (Eschscholzia californica) are much paler than their bright orange cousins, and their ivory petals and yellow centres bring a fresh vibe to spring borders. They bloom March to May and readily self-seed: seeds are available from Eden Brothers, get them in the ground right now!

Columbine is another super-pretty spring bloom, and ‘Earlybird’, available from Nature Hills, is an elegant mellow-yellow cultivar that flowers earlier than most. Aquilegia is tough enough to be reliably perennial in Zones 3–9 and, once established, gets growing well before winter’s out. Ranunculus (Persian buttercup) generally flowers in April but also likes to get a head start if winter ends early in warmer Zones 8–10 where it acts as a perennial. If you’re in colder Zones 4–7, treat it as an annual and get some corms started indoors now – Eden Brothers stock a buttercream variety with opulent double flowers that are just divine.

Instant Patio Upgrade

To complement all these butter-yellow blooms, arm yourself with a pot of paint and add an accent color to items you already own, or upcycle an object into a garden treasure. Acrylic paint, available in light yellow from Amazon, can be used for exterior crafts such as painting pebbles – why not create a mandala pattern for a pretty effect? For an enduring finish on wood, brick, concrete and primed metal, Glidden Total Exterior Paint is available from Amazon in a wide range of yellow shades, including a soft but still-sunny Demeter. A soft yellow tone makes a fabulous foil for all the brighter colors of summer to come, so you could even paint a feature wall.

Adorable Garden Accents