Colour

Planning colour schemes - but not thinking too hard

Patthana Garden in Co. Wicklow, Ireland: a garden where colour is the driving force

Colour is one of the things that people worry about most in a planting scheme. The parameters are huge, and there are so many plants to choose from. Where do you start? The first thing I’d say is relax and be intuitive; almost let the colours be incidental. Having said that, spending time looking at different colour combinations and really thinking about why you are drawn to some and not others is a valuable exercise, and it makes you think about how you can create different moods in the garden and how you can manipulate your own and others’ emotions and feelings just through colour.

As a starting point it can be interesting to take a look at the designers’ colourwheel to understand how colours work with and against each other. The simple flower-friendly one above is courtesy of Gardeners World website and it shows the basic spectrum of colours you may find in the garden, with hundreds of other shade variations between each. In a border you can choose either analogous (similar shades next to each other on the wheel), complementary (contrasting across the colourwheeel) or clashing colour schemes (a mishmash of anything and everything). I realise I often inadvertently put complementary colours together - the orange of Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’ with the purple-blue of a salvia, for instance, or the magenta pink of Dianthus carthusianorum and Geranium psilostemon with the lime green of Alchemilla mollis. These combinations are punchier than the analagous combinations - the ones that combine plants in similar tones on the colour wheel - and I have learnt over time that my eye craves this excitement.