Using colour in garden designs...

How does your garden make you feel? Many factors combine to create the ‘feel’ of a garden, and when garden designers in Glasgow think about this, the rules are of course the same wherever you are. The use of colour in a garden design is one of the key principles that garden designers are guided by. The appropriate combination of colours in a planting plan can make a garden design feel relaxing, striking, exotic, even hot or cold! Colour is created not just by flowers but also by foliage, as well as the non-living elements of your garden such as gravel, fences and walls.

The most important colour to think about when creating a planting plan is of course green. I always make sure that there is enough evergreen and leafy growth in my garden, so that even in times when there are no flowers it still looks lush and alive. In a planting plan I often look to have about a third of the plants being evergreen. I fertilize my garden and water it regularly, and this makes sure the rich varieties of greens are lush and vibrant. The brown colour of soil is another neutralising colour, like green, that keeps a garden feeling natural. Ideally, however, you do not want to be able to see loads of open areas of earth in your garden as this is where the weeds will pop up.

Flowers and foliage in the red and orange colour spectrum can provide a feeling of exoticness and
warmth, whilst blues and purples are cooling and calming colours. Garden designers know to choose plants carefully with effects like this in mind. A garden designers employ to increase the feeling of spaciousness in a garden involves using both warm and cool colours. If you place reds and oranges closer to your house, and cooler blues and purples deeper into the garden, you help make your garden feel bigger – sounds funny but it works! Likewise, you can reverse these combinations to make a large space feel smaller and more intimate. Beware too diverse a range of different colours however as you can end up making a garden feel chaotic with a riot of clashing colours.

White flowers are useful in a garden as they will go with any other colours. An overabundance of
white flowers can feel clinical, but a planting a smattering of white flowers throughout a garden is a great idea. Remember as well that white flowers stand out at dawn and dusk, the times of the day when many people most often see their garden.

There are numerous other considerations to make when selecting different colours for a garden, but do not worry about sticking too rigidly to these rules. The important thing is that your garden makes you feel good, but thinking about these various principles of garden may just help you along the way.

Tom Angel provides planting plans, garden designs and horticultural advice and consultancy (such as surveying for japanese knotweed) from his base in Glasgow. Having spent the last twenty years working in horticulture everywhere from Brittany to London to the highlands of Scotland, Tom has an in-depth knowledge of which plants work well in garden design planting plans, and most importantly which survive for the long term.