Even if you don’t want to sell your house, you and your neighbors will enjoy your front yard more if you fill it with lively yellow blossoms. Because yellow attracts attention, use it with an equally strong, bright partner, like white. One of the crispest, freshest, most appealing color schemes in nature and in horticulture is yellow, white, and green. Green, being the darker hue, sets off the two lighter, brighter hues, while yellow and white, well matched in value, vie for attention without detracting from each other. These light, bright colors succeed in front of a white house, where darker colors fail. Few colors—except yellow, yellow-green, light orange, and white itself—can compete with the large expanse of a light-colored exterior wall.

Yellow, white, and blue constitute a wonderful trio, outdoors and in. Interior designer Tricia Guild describes these three hues as “the colors of summer days,” but they work best in the spring garden. Indeed, yellow is one of nature’s favorite colors for the season. From wildflowers, such as trout lilies (Erythronium spp. and cvs.) and marsh marigold (Caltha palustris), to shrubs, like early-blooming spice bush (Lindera benzoin), to the infant leaves of forest trees, the prevailing colors in the natural landscape are yellow-green and yellow. Garden shrubs with yellow flowers, such as witch hazels (Hamamelis spp. and cvs.), winter hazels (Corylopsis spp. and cvs.), and forsythias (Forsythia spp. and cvs.), lend themselves to being underplanted with carpets of blue and white bulbs, such as glory-in-the-snow (Chionodoxa spp. and cvs.), anemones (Anemone spp. and cvs.), and grape hyacinths (Muscari spp. and cvs.).