Would You Partner with Cloud Dancer?
December 2025. By Isara Ongwiseth: Each year, as the holidays begin, we wait for a present from the Pantone Institute – their prediction of the color that will drive what we see in decor and fashion throughout the year. The Institute defines the Color of the Year that influences and contextualizes all the others.
This year, the Institute chose Cloud Dancer. A pretty basic white. Really??? That’s complicated! At first, it took me back 5 years to the dread of their 2021 choice of gray. Gray! While I did eventually find joy in Ultimate Gray, that had a lot to do with its Illuminating partner color. Ironically, Pantone gave Cloud Dancer no partner!
Of course, I prefer to look on the bright side. As a designer, I like the Institute’s description of Cloud Dancer as a blank slate and place to make a fresh start. Because Pantone left Cloud Dancer free to float, they left us with the option to choose its partner or partners. Of course, for us, green must be one of them!
While the Institute’s suggested palettes are low-intensity pastels, nature often pairs LA’s authentic whites with high intensity greens. Consider the bright, true greens that host the cloud-like, white blooms of Common Yarrow and California Buckwheat. Most manzanitas and Coyote Bushes, as well as Snowberries, also pop against bright greens. Red Buckwheat foliage pairs a Cloud Dancer white and true green in just its evergreen foliage.
We enjoy the high contrast between white blooms and dense, dark, moody foliage. Nature offers us plenty of choices here too! Snow Flurry California Lilac blooms seem to float among its little green leaves until the shrub itself becomes a cloud. If you look closely, its blooms contain the same little drop of sunshine visible in Beach Strawberry, Bush Anenome, and Christmas Berry flowers.
The foliage of other plants keeps fairly close to Pantone’s pastel palette preferences. The silver-green foliage of Sacred (White) Sage certainly comes to mind, as does the foliage of Yucca Whipplei’s spiky base, most Dudleyas, and other native sages. The blooms that float above this foliage generally fit within the pastel-forward palettes of 2026 too. In that way, the bigger Pantone picture feels like a call-back to 2024’s Peach Fuzz or even 2015’s Limpet Shell.
It would be possible to create a landscape full of Cloud Dancers. It may feel a little like an ice cream shop that offers only vanillas. Sure, there are subtle differences, but will they be enough to interest you long term? IMHO, landscapes look and function best the way LA makes them – full of a diversity of colors, textures and fragrences that complement one another.
Plant Palettes
Here are ways to bring trending pops of color into your landscape.
More Information
- Isara on Colors of the Year:
- Pantone Institute: Color of the Year
- Today: Why Pantone’s Color of the Year Sparked Controversy
- House Beautiful: All the Colors of the Year So Far
