All signs were pointing to this year being less than exciting colour-wise. Paint company Benjamin Moore promised that 2025 is going to be all about Cinnamon Slate, described as a “delicate mix of heathered plum and velvety brown.” Sherwin Williams went the extra mile introducing a “color capsule” of the year which included a painfully tasteful group of whites, beiges, browns, a chartreuse and a mauve. And then the highly influential Pantone Color Institute predicted that the hue of 2025 is Mocha Mousse. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

But then along comes Garden Media, the company that advises the horticulture industry on marketing all things gardening. They’ve decided gardening’s colour of the year is the bold, bright, rarely natural teal. Wait, what?

A blue spruce glows in the sunshine. Taken on a garden tour in north Toronto.

Why teal?

Their reasoning is sound. They figure teal aligns with growing wellness trends and is also a sophisticated hue, evoking the nostalgia of the 90’s. SIDENOTE: I personally have zero nostalgia for the Nineties. My memory is (willfully) foggy on the subject although I’ll admit I may have made some unfortunate fashion choices back then.

Teal, according to Garden Media, can also be as calming as the Caribbean Sea and as zingy as a plastic parasol. There’s something to be said for having both calm and zing in your back pocket as we head into this crazy year.

Succulents may not be completely teal coloured but they can certainly hint at the hue.

So, of course, I had to start looking into my photo archives to see if teal actually existed in the wild. Surprisingly, it does. You may have to squint a bit but it’s there.

Finding the real teal

A lot of the teal I found was actually more of a glimmer or an iridescence – a stare-right-at-it-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of thing. The colour could be in our gardens and may be there almost all of the time but certain elements have to come into play, not unlike the stars aligning, before you can actually see the colour.

Take those gorgeous teal stems in the photo above. I took that photo in the dead of winter when the British sky was pure white. No shadows. The chalky raspberry canes just shone.

The case for fake teal

Of course, there’s the unapologetically fake garden accent.

A dead branch still attached to a living tree at Keppel Croft Gardens in Big Bay, Ontario, gets a second life as sculpture, complete with fake parrot.

Left: Teal-coloured stones are scattered amongst volcanic stones in a rock garden in Ontario. Right: Painted glass panes at Reford Gardens in Gaspe, Quebec, add strokes of fantastic, floating colour in the garden.

Getting teal in your garden

Here’s a (very) short list of plants that can add some real teal to your garden:

• Blue fescue
• Agave
• Succulents including Senecio and Orostachys
• Zamin Allium, available to order through Breck’s, is an explosion of teals and blues.
• In spring, I love the tiny blooms of Striped Squill (Puschkinia Libanotica)–white starbursts striped in vivid teal blue. You can order the bulbs in the fall at Veseys in Canada.

Puschkinia coming up in early spring in my old garden in Ontario.

What do you think about teal? Will you make it your colour of the year? Do you have teal-coloured plants in your garden? I’d love to know what kinds you might have and what kind you might like to add.