Beautiful photos. Love your color combinations. DonâÂÂt forget the blues of the sky and the greens of leaves that are almost always present and go beautifully together.
I am not an artist but have a scientific background and scientifically the complimentary colors as we find out using lcd displays, inkjet printers and photoshop are:
Blue & Yellow
Cyan & Red
Green & Magenta
This opens up even more possibilities.

An invention called a color wheel has been used to compare colors. Home gardeners and others assembling small plantings can visit well-stocked plant stores and carry potted specimens around to hold up against other kinds of plants on display, see how they look together.

Nowadays many plant outlets here also show the way by assembling and maintaining changing "displays" of different kinds of potted plants having both complimentary and contrasting features.

This post was edited by bboy on Sun, Nov 10, 13 at 14:15

Yes we've written about this before (see link). We find the color wheel invaluable in selecting pairings/groupings of plants. Thx for noting that, Ron.

Sara

Here is a link that might be useful: Using color theory to create harmonious foliage combinations

My point is that the color wheel was not an invention, it can be discovered. We can discover complimentary colors every day with our color printers or color TVs and monitors.

When children mix blue and yellow with their crayons and get green, they realize what artists already know, colors are not unique. They can be created by mixing other colors. Artists mix paints to get colors. So they figure out which primary paints (colors) they need to create the others. For many years printers have created most every color of the rainbow with just a few primary ink colors. Since paints actually absorb every color except what you see, the technique used by artists and printers is called subtractive color. When color television, computer monitors, ipods, ipads, etc. came about, it was found that color could be created by adding color sources, a process called additive color. In fact color TV is based upon 3 colors, Red, Blue & Green. It makes most every other color you see from these 3 colors by adding varying intensities of these 3 colors. These are the primary additive colors. By the same token, many color printers today create most every color from Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. These are the primary subtractive colors.

As a scientist I can discover that if I shut off blue on my computer, everything turns a shade of yellow. If I turn off green, everything turns a shade of magenta. If I turn off red, everything turns a shade of cyan. Similarly, if the cyan ink cartridge runs out of ink, the printer prints in shades of red. If the magenta ink cartridge runs out, things turn shades of green. If yellow runs out, things turn shades of blue. That is how we discover easily discover that these truly are complimentary colors:

Blue is complimentary to Yellow
Cyan is complimentary to Red
Green is complimentary to Magenta

I know that this doesn't agree with the color wheel artists use, and I don't understand what is wrong with this method of scientifically finding complimentary colors. Could the color wheel be wrong? Is the color wheel perhaps someones opinion and not fact? Being a scientist and not an artist, what am I missing?