How To Use Pantone's Beautiful 2025 Color Of The Year In Your Garden

When the Pantone Color of the Year is announced, it's not only an opportunity for people to appreciate the color chosen (or learn to love it if it's not a favorite). It's also a signal to explore ways to bring that color into our lives. This is often encouraged through fashion and decor choices, but flowers — indoors and out — are also a wonderful way to explore the color of the year. Pantone's beautiful 2025 choice, "Mocha Mousse," has many great possibilities for your garden.

But, you may be thinking, that's just...brown. Are there even any brown flowers? The answer turns out to be yes! Because this delicious shade is actually one that combines a wide array of hues, making it a perfect vehicle for exploring the subtle colors of garden flowers, including annuals and perennials. As a professional gardener, one of my favorite things to do in winter is to look at spring flower catalogs to get inspiration by all the colors and seeing what's new.

If you're curious about which flowers with mocha hues might be right for your garden, there's plenty of exploring to do. You may not find plants listed when looking under "mocha" or "coffee" and if you do, it may be for flowers that are specially dyed, or only available to the florist trade. But there are other color names to look for, like tan, brown, beige, buff, orange, bronze, peach, amber, and copper. Also try foodie color names like chocolate, butterscotch, toffee, honey, cream, or caramel.  You'll find a surprising number of choices of flowers in this color family.

When you design your garden around color, timing matters almost as much as plant selection. Roses are a great example. Their bloom times vary, yet they're often a focal point of color in the garden due to their size and floriferous nature. Most roses undergo subtle color shifts through the season, from bud to just before their petals drop. To amplify a mocha rose's different undertones, place them near similar colors. There are a few mocha-toned roses to try. 

The hybrid tea rose, 'Cappuccino', has pale taupe petals blushed with pink, which would harmonize well with pastel pinks, soft yellow, or peach flowers. The 'Honey Dijon' rose has tan, pink, and yellow hues, so it's also well-suited to pair with warm pastel flowers. A mauve-tinted rose like 'Connie's Sandstorm' or 'Koko Loko' would pair well with lavender or purple delphiniums, phlox, or mums. One of my favorites, 'Hot Cocoa' has chocolaty-orange petals tinted with red and plum and would pair nicely with mums, since it blooms continually until frost.

Another approach is to try a monochromatic color palette — planting similar flower colors together. It might seem like this would look dull or bland, but quite the opposite: The subtle variations in color seem to create an endlessly fascinating colorscape. To accent mocha roses, add other pastel flowers in soft, neutral shades of pink, orange, yellow, tan, plum, mauve, cream, or bronze. For richer mocha tones, plant alongside orange, bronze, burgundy and purple flowers. Try pale blues, too, which will contrast well with mocha's orange tones.

To work with mocha hues in the garden, consider some design tricks to show them off. Mocha is a fairly neutral color family, which makes it quite flexible. A bit of contrast can help showcase paler or darker colors, as too much of either can get lost in the garden. Also, consider the shapes and textures of the mocha-hued flowers you're planting, and make sure there's some variety. 

Dahlias have a wide range of sizes, shapes, textures, and tints, even within one color family. Although some taller dahlia varieties need staking to keep them from drooping, smaller ones can be grown in containers, giving you some flexibility. Some tall ones to try: 'Cafe au Lait' has fluffy layered petals of cream touched with yellow and tan, while 'Creme de Cognac' is  a warm peach with hints of copper and gold, and the nearly six-foot tall 'Brown Sugar' is a distinctive ball shape with tight orange-copper petals. For smaller container sized dahlias, try creamy pink 'Diana's Memory' or the pale yellow, mauve-edged dwarf dahlia 'Zingaro'.

For richer, darker mocha hues, look for flowers with spiky shapes, to help their deep tones stand out more sharply. Spider daylilies are a good choice because the flowers stand out on long slender stems and the shape allows plenty of light to shine through. Try  'Milk Chocolate' (tan, burgundy, and yellow), or 'Chocolate Sparkles' (copper brown, cranberry red, chartreuse). My father's vegetable garden had a clump of coffee-colored spider daylilies I've divided many times. I don't know the cultivar but it looks a lot like 'Brown Witch.'  

Mocha flowers can be implemented in many kinds of garden spaces throughout the season. Spring-blooming bearded irises are a great spring choice and include many luscious "coffee shop" shades. Irises have a relatively short bloom period, but keep them deadheaded and the flowers will keep coming for weeks. My favorite heirloom variety, 'Quaker Lady' , has rosy buff colored standards with lavender falls and yellow beards. Also consider 'Copper Classic' (peach standards, coppery pink falls), 'Brown Duet' (rosy tan standards, rust orange falls), 'Boss Tweed' (copper, tan, and rust), 'Ruffled Feathers' (cream with brown edges), and 'High Roller' (rosy tan). At the front of the spring flower bed, try the viola pansy 'Angel Amber Kiss' with rich brown tones. 

For late spring into summer, avens (Geum) are lovely, frilly bloomers. Try 'Mai Tai' or 'Cosmopolitan' for your pastel mocha palette. At the back of the sunny summer border, the  'Procut Plum' sunflower has petals of plum, cream, and tan. Sunflowers are easily grown from seed in a sunny spot in your garden, you just need to direct sow after the last frost date. For a mid-height annual, try the 'Chocolate' cosmo, a deep burgundy version of this summer annual. 

Planted in summer and blooming through fall, 'Coffee and Cream' calendulas are easy annuals for a splash of creamy mocha color at the front of the border. For perennial autumn blooms, the 'Mocha' chrysanthemum' is a spider mum with beautiful mauve and dusty pink petals, while football mum, 'Homecoming,' has pleasing shades of muted salmon and peach.