Colour in the Garden

dusky pinks and reds

Colour in the garden is much harder to talk about than it should be, but I want to try. You see, garden colour is never the same as gardening book colour. This isn't to say that the specialised books on colour are hopeless - on the contrary, they are amazing, and quasi-inspirational.

They do, however, miss out some very vital links. Firstly, colour in a real garden context has a strong seasonal, progressive element - colours announcing spring carry very different messages to colours trying to be cheerful in tired late summer. Seeing a colour newly blooming can bring the joy of first discovery, but that same colour can be boring three weeks later.

splodges, blotches and blue streaks

The Blues

Real colours in the garden bring out reactions from the people seeing them. Colours can be associated with memories good and bad, and we've all worn atrocious colours thinking we looked just great. People don't need a reason to change their mind about colours, either. And some colours just have a bad reputation - ever has 'The Blues'?

Purple Problems

I remember one year this happened to me mid-summer with the colour purple. It was everywhere, thanks to the self seeding pansies and violas, and I decided one afternoon that it was all coming out. That was that. Reading about my zealous purge later is quite puzzling - it must have been a seasonal thing, for I love the purple pansies at the moment. It's early summer, and their purple-ness hasn't been around for very long.

The colour magenta is much maligned, or feted, depending on how devilish one feels. Magenta-purple was the first colour I remember seeing here in the garden - it was spring, and honesty was in bloom everywhere. The first days in the new house staring at the existing garden and the lawns will stay with me for ever. I couldn't believe that I could be so lucky. I'd never seen honesty before, and was totally overwhelmed by its generosity. In memory of those first days I cherish that colour! I've deliberately tried to buy irises the same colour to carry on the feeling into November.

in the pink

Pinked Out

From where I'm sitting at the moment I can see the rose Mutabilis glowing in the late afternoon sun. Such an amazing range of pink shades - just wonderful. This rose reaffirms my love of the colour pink, a colour which I don't feel very confident with. I think I sowed too many of those bright pink Lavatera annual flowers in an early year here, and got a bit "pinked-out".

The green in the leaves of the variegated perennial Scrophularia is one of the best greens - a soft, clean green. With sun at the right angle the big veined leaves of Nicotiana Sylvestris are a beautiful green. Greens are great. Roses look good because they have a backdrop of green. That's the theory, anyway, which bimonthly rose sprayers agree with.

Lately when I notice a colour combination which pleases me, it usually has an element of lime green in it. Never blue/grey. One year I remember the blue/grey lambs ears annoying me. I ripped them all out and replaced them with the soft lime green version. I saw blue/grey as dull and dirty, and somehow that reaction has stuck. Silver grey I'm happy with, particularly if it's feathery (like some Artemesias), and I cope with the big bold blue/grey hostas. Maybe I'm just being irrational.

When a gardener goes through a colour phase that usually means they've been reading too many gardening books on colour.

cool calm greens

Colour Phases

Every cottage gardener goes through the "apricot and white only" foxglove phase, ripping out any seedlings with suspiciously dark stems. Hot border converts find themselves embracing the same orange and red dahlias they once dismissed as laughably suburban. Foliage freaks can get obsessed by variegation - not too green, not too cream, not too yellow. Bright red pelargoniums become fashionable, in a French provincial sort of way. Terracotta endures as always.

The first year here I thought I needed to control colour. I was creating gardens from nothing, and I had to be properly organised. So I diligently collected seeds from the pansies and violas, and wrote careful, detailed labels - "light wedgewood blue top, fading at edges, with lemon bottom, darker blue splodge middle". The bees turned that into a joke.

Then I attempted some well researched colour co-ordination. The peachy colour of the azaleas would be echoed by the same colour in the chrysanthemums down the border. It seems so obvious to me now that these flowers were months apart in flowering times - but not to a brand new gardener, desperately keen to do the right thing.

light green and cherry red

Colour Crisis

There was a colour crisis the year the Icing Sugar Border was planted. It was named for all its frothy white and pink roses and perennials - it looked like someone had sprinkled icing sugar and chopped marshmallows over everything. I loved this border for weeks, but suddenly one day a distant memory of sweet sickly party food must have resurfaced. In my eyes the border was ruined, and like a lover on the rebound I turned to yellow - anything, as long as it was yellow. Yellow was the antidote for overindulging in pink and white, and I went on a yellow crusade, poking in daylilies and flaxes and hypericum. Why yellow?

It does come down to two things - control and constancy. Why should gardeners need or aspire to either? Do I care if the pansies are having a colour duel with the terracotta pot? What's wrong with bright pink, anyway? I'll consider it a living memorial to my daughter's first ballet tutu, and enjoy it - until I change my mind!