So often, though, we work all day in an office or even in the garden and never take the time to enjoy our triumphs. Evening gardens are meant to enjoy, to savour, to wrap us in their splendour. Moonlight illuminates the flowers and foliage making the garden at night a different experience, almost surreal and magical. The most obvious way to enhance the darkness is to use flowers that are light or white in colour. Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West's white garden at Sissinghurst in England is the best known of the white gardens.
Any gardener can plant varieties that are often best viewed in the shadows of night.
The popular impatiens is a prime example of a simple, everyday flower that thrives in shady locations and comes in the whitest of whites. Planted in pots on a deck or in masses in the front of the border, impatiens can reflect light from the moon to create beautiful snowy mounds of brightness. Tall, elegant trumpet lilies are magnificent towering in the back of the border with their deep outer petals contrasting with the brightest of whites or golden yellow centres that glow in the moonlight. Many flowering shrubs, peonies, roses, hydrangeas come in bright whites and yellows that will add splashes of brightness to the border in evening. Bright foliage is another way to create evening glow in the garden.