October Porch

Autumn is the easiest season to overdo. Everything in the shops is orange, and if you buy all of it you end up with a porch that looks like a grocery display.

So this one runs on repetition and a tight palette. Lemon cypress gives the vertical line in both urns. Croton carries the orange and gold, and because its variegation is already doing three colors at once, nothing else needs to. Ornamental cabbage fills the base with something cool and slightly gray, which stops the whole arrangement going warm and flat.

The pumpkins step the composition down from urn height to ground level. That is the part people notice without knowing why. It gives the eye somewhere to travel, so the porch reads as a whole from the curb rather than as two pots either side of a door.