Many gardeners survive the cold, dreary winter months in the comfort of their own sunny garden daydreams-warm, and weed and insect free, these fantastic places are the stuff beginning garden plans are made of. With pencil and paper in hand, and a few favored garden supply catalogs and picture books, these delicate souls begin the annual process of planning next year's landscape.

Even those hardy folks who actually enjoy the cold season and the activities it brings will eventually sit down to plan a garden plot, complete with tried and true favorites as well as a few new items to try.

Next time you sit down to plan a new garden bed, instead of using only the standard set of guidelines for your map, try making your highest priority the colors in your bed. It takes some real thought to put together a garden with flowers from a single color family. The results can often be even better than the imagination. A limited color palette creates an air of sophistocation that multicolor gardens can't attain.

Because flowers are difficult to catagorize by exact color, it is a good idea to allow for a certain degree of overlap - true blues are very hard to come by, so you'll probably want to include purple as well. And you should be aware that some colors in the same family of hues can be very different - for example, certain purples are more red, while others are more pink, which can be a potentially unpleasant combination!Once you have decided which color family you want to work with, you will need to make a calendar of bloom periods for each plant that you decide to use. This will insure a long season of beautiful flowers throughout your landscape.

You should take artistic license when-ever you feel it is warranted by adding, for example, a patch of bright yellow Coreopsis 'Moonbeam' to a blue/purple garden. Or add plantings of Baby's Breath (Gyposphila) and Ox-Eye Daisy across the area to add white background to a red/orange planting. Just be careful to limit the variations, or else you might end up with a multicolor landscape after all. Yet another dimension might be using white for a nighttime flower garden.

To add more interest to a monotone garden, use foliage texture. Try something with ferny foliage like yarrow, and use something else with spiky leaves, like chives or iris. Play those against the rounded leaves of impatiens.

Use foliage color to help carry the eye around your bed also. Artemesia has a nice silvery foliage color, while something like Huechera or ajuga has a lovely dark reddish leaf color. Use these dramatic foliage plants to add another dimension to your bed.

You can use perennials, annuals, shrubs, trees and vines-you could be really daring and even use a vegetable or two if it will add something of value to your single color garden. Be creative, and above all have fun!