A guide to playing with colour

Similar to an interior decorating choosing a colour scheme for a space, gardeners can sometimes overlook the joy of selecting a theme for their garden. By harnessing your lighting and working with contrast, you can create a beautiful and fulfilling panorama that’ll wow guests and make afternoons in your garden that much brighter. 

Despite the required planning the results really can be spectacular. When you’re planning your garden’s colour palette, try to take stock of every colour present in your garden’s surroundings. For example, contrasts like white flowers against white fencing aren’t nearly as impactful and dramatic as yellow or purple flowers in the same space. 

If you can catalogue and counter these influential visuals coming in from your surroundings, you can make an informed decision on the colours of your garden and the result will appear refined and complete. By sticking to a consistent colour scheme, you create visual unity in sections of your garden that cater to very different plant types.

Once you’re happy with your colour palette, your options open up in a lot of exciting ways. Unity can come from planting the same coloured flower throughout your garden, but you can also opt to plant varying flower species of the same colour to add variety without moving away from your chosen appearance. For example, rows of yellow marigolds bring the same air of unity as a combination of lavender, blue petunias, and blue salvia.

It’s important to remember that colours influence our emotions in meaningful ways. Brighter colours like yellows and reds will excite in the same way that greens and blues will relax. It’s a very visceral inner dialogue that can come to define an atmosphere if executed on with care. When guests enter your home, are they walking into a zone of excitement or serenity? Is your back yard a place of rest, or play? When it comes to the indoors you can define those spaces with great interior decorating, but a garden’s placement and colour palette can set the tone right from the first look.

Best of all, many modern annuals are available in a full spectrum of colours and way more tones and shades than ever before, including designer colours and blends! Just about every combination of colour you can think of is open to you, and your distinct look has never been easier to find. Have fun!

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