Photographer passionate about using color in the garden
Garden designers talk a lot about form and texture. Shapes, lines, outdoor structures — these elements persist long after ephemeral features such as flowers have come and gone. They comprise what experts often call the “bones” of a landscape.
I appreciate what they’re saying. Really, I do.
But I have to admit that when I’m plant-shopping or visiting a friend’s garden and a gorgeous hue or a colorful combination catches my eye, I gravitate toward it like a bee to, well, a beautiful blossom.
For color-holics like me, the reissue of “The Gardener’s Book of Color” is all the encouragement we need.
“Color is the most potent weapon in a gardener’s armory,” writes author Andrew Lawson. “Nothing in a garden makes more impact.”
This is perhaps the ideal topic for Lawson, who has spent decades as a professional garden photographer in his native Britain and whose work is enjoyed around the world.
“When I fell into garden photography in 1985, I had no idea it could be a profession. But that is how it has turned out,” he writes on his website, www.andrewlawson.com. “For me, being a garden photographer brings together my joint passions for natural history and for making pictures.”
“The Gardener’s Book of Color” also unites those passions — and in a most appealing and enlightening manner.
It combines a mini-class on color theory, observations on the emotional aspects of color, and page after page of inspiring photos that show how color functions and how gardeners can use it.
Although not exactly light reading, his discussions of concepts such as saturation and the color wheel clearly explain effects that gardeners might have noticed but not quite understood.
Readers may find themselves saying “Aha!” more than once as they learn about
how and why certain hues behave as they do — and they may never look at a garden the same way.
He explains why some colors look good together while others clash; why some landscapes feel relaxing or even soothing; and why, for instance, a certain yellow succeeds in a mixed planting while a slightly different shade puts you off.
Readers needn’t be physicists, though, to grasp the power of color.
Thankfully, Lawson appreciates its emotional as well as physiological aspects.
“Memory and symbolic associations, without a doubt, play a very strong part in our experience of color,” he writes.
Red, for instance, may feel agitating, while blue is often “calming and dreamy.”
Although Lawson offers dozens of individual examples, from orange dahlias to purple crocuses, the sections on combinations might be the most inspiring.
“Color harmonies are the result of putting together closely related colors, such as those that are next to each other on the color wheel,” he explains.
Pink and lavender, for example, make gentle partners.
On the other hand, • “The Gardener’s Book of Color” (Firefly, 232 pages, $24.95) by Andrew Lawson
“Contrasts in the garden are stimulating. They happen in such a way that each intensifies the other” — red flowers, for instance, with green leaves.
In the 20 years since the first edition, styles of gardening “have changed massively.”
“There has been a wholly admirable return to the natural look,” Lawson observes. Meadows and random combinations, for example, have become hugely popular.
What remains steadfast, though, is the human desire to use color to create beautiful landscapes.
Diana Lockwood, a freelance writer covering gardening topics, posts on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ mrsgardenperson.