IN THE GARDEN DO YOUR BEST TO KEEP VALLEY COLORFUL.

Byline: JOSHUA SISKIN

In the Valley, colorful front yard garden displays are few and far between. With the exception of annual color beds here and there and some conglomerations of roses - which look nice enough for a few weeks in early spring - you could easily fall asleep driving down a local street if staying awake depended on color in the landscape.

I often wonder what happens to all the brilliantly flowering plants you see in nurseries and home improvement garden centers. Perhaps all these plants are consumed by snails the moment they are placed in the ground, or perhaps they die or suffer irreversible trauma between the moment they are loaded in the car and the moment of planting.

Never put plants inside a car with closed windows. The heat that builds up inside is considerable and can cause plants to wilt in a matter of minutes, especially plants such as impatiens that have been grown in the shade. Plants should ideally be transported in your windowless trunk - through which sunlight that turns to heat cannot enter. Trunk transported plants stay relatively cool. Upon arriving home, leaving plants on the driveway is also hazardous since paved surfaces will quickly dry out a plant's roots, especially if the plant has not been recently watered.

Prepare the ground for planting before you purchase plants. That way, when you return, you can attend to the job of planting immediately. If your plants have started to dry out, soak them (while still in their containers) in a shallow bucket of water. Not only should the root ball be moist prior to planting; garden soil should be moist, too. Water plants every day for the first two weeks they are in the ground. A plant wilts and often dies when, prior to rooting out into the surrounding soil, the interface between root ball and garden soil becomes dry.

To create a satisfying, enduring color display, you will want flowers blooming at several levels. This can be achieved, for example, by selecting long-blooming landscaping roses of different heights such as ground cover roses (up to 18 inches), miniature or shrub roses (up to 3 feet), floribunda roses (up to 5 feet), and climbing roses (to 10 feet or more).

If you can confine your plant palette to three colors, the display will be that much more powerful. For instance, you could choose orange, pink and yellow; or red, pink and salmon; or blue, violet and pink. For some reason, pink has a unifying effect in color gardens of all types, perhaps because it stretches from the pale pink found in crinums, in certain dahlias and in many roses, to the pink infused with purple seen in Clematis and to the pink-petaled, yellow-stamened flowers such as Cosmos and Japanese anemone. In the Valley, the ordinary pink-flowered, green-leafed bedding begonia is the workhorse of many color gardens, blooming 12 months of the year and reaching a height, when regularly fertilized, of 2 feet.

TIP OF THE WEEK: Michele Lauren inquired about the availability of black-leafed plants. Just recently, I saw black elephant ear (Colocasia esculenta ``Black Magic'') at a nursery in Canoga Park. This plant is easily grown in the shade or at the edges of a water pond. Another black-leafed shade lover you might want to try is black mondo grass (Ophiopogon planiscapus ``Nigrescens''), used as a ground cover and potted patio plant.