How to create the perfect COLOUR combination

With careful plant choice, clever use of light and a bit of trial and error, you can enjoy a striking palette all year round, says Monty Don

SO often you hear people refer to a ‘riot of colour’ as though that was intrinsically a good thing but in truth, a riot quickly becomes wearying if not downright dangerous.

Colours in the garden are there to be selected and managed as carefully as in any painting or wardrobe. Some work well together, others do not. Some appeal to you, others never feel right however much another may love them. The key is to choose your colours and choose well.

Don’t let yourself be accountable to the taste police. If you like a colour then luxuriate in it. I like orange flowers and would be very sorry not to have tithonias, leonotis, heleniums, eschscholzia, zinnias, marigolds, orange dahlias and cannas, or the orange Buddleja globosa. But I have a good friend who cannot tolerate the thought of a single orange flower in her garden. Each to their colourful own. There’s never a right or wrong in these things, just what works most for your garden. These guidelines will help you use colour wisely...

KEEP IT SIMPLE

Don’t just chuck it all at a border thinking that the more colour you plant, the more colourful the result will be. Just like a painter’s palette, too much colour quickly muddies. Choose a colour theme, keep it simple and stick to it.

Opposites intensify and similar shades add complexity; use both to create the desired effect. A brilliant blue iris or purple clematis will be even more intensely blue or purple if orange tithonia is planted next to it. Likewise, a collection of oldfashioned roses in various ruffles and flounces of pink, set perhaps among mauve Verbena bonariensis or lavender have the effect of adding depth and complexity to each other without diminishing the overall effect.

Colours are also affected as much by what you do not use. For example, in the Jewel Garden we have absolutely no white nor any shade of pink other than magenta (a pink so blue that it is almost purple). The Writing Garden – officially all white – has touches of pink and pale yellow in spring because it is surrounded by fruit trees smothered in pink blossom and underplanted with thousands of daffodils. Everything needs context.

SEE THE LIGHT

The light at different times of day and year affects how we see and react to colour more than any other factor. Use this. So rich plums, burgundies and oranges look better in the low light of evening and best of all in late summer and early autumn, when there is exactly the mix of light and direction to maximise their velvet intensity. Pastels, on the other hand, look best in the much clearer morning light. White is lost in midday sun but looks fantastic at dusk. In winter, you need as much dark green as possible to counter the gloom of brown and grey that dominates once all deciduous leaves have fallen. Use it to create structure, with evergreen hedges and topiary, and you have a winter garden – stark, strong but rich with colour.

The soft morning light of a May or June day is perfect for pinks, primrose yellows and pale blues that glow and shimmer. Similarly, the intense blues, chrome yellows and oranges that look so dramatic in a Spanish or Moroccan garden under the midday sun become lifeless under northern cloud. It all comes back to working with nature – including the natural light.

In my garden we’ve used colours to define the planting in various areas of the garden.

The most dramatic is the Jewel Garden.

This uses ruby reds, amethyst purples, sapphire and lapis blues and emerald greens of all shades as the core colours, with gold, silver, brass and bronze touched with the

bright oranges of topaz and citrine, and plenty of burgundies and plum colours.

The effect is rich, dramatic and lustrous. But it’s rarely subtle, is rather late coming into its own in spring and is at its best in low evening light. It works wonderfully well as a vibrant centrepiece but might be a bit overpowering as the sole colour palette of the garden.

GREEN MEANS CALM

Remember that you can never have too much green. Every garden should be set among lots and lots of green. All the other colours then work from this green base. A white garden is in actual fact a green garden but with white highlights.

Rich jewel colours glow from an Monty’s Jewel Garden equally rich palette of greens. Green is endless in its variations and is the colour that begins and ends all planting. A garden that’s just green can be a beautifully calm, inspiring place.

Pink is the hardest colour to get dead right. Yet it is worth the attempt because when pink is working seamlessly in harmony with all the tones around it, neither too aggressively red nor omi- nously blue, not sickly sweet and not washed out, it can create a mood of buoyant celebration like no other floral colour. Pink works well with pink, with many shades of green, and with pale blues and white. But pale pinks combined with rich colours are mutually toxic.

You have to experiment and allow yourself to make mistakes. When we started planting the Jewel Garden we used white to represent diamond and silver. But it did not work. White is both an absence of colour and a moderator of the colours around it. So we removed all the white and now use glaucous blue from the foliage of plants such as cardoons to provide the suggestion of silver.

The Writing Garden is notionally a white garden. But it’s terribly easy to overdo white in any border, especially if the pristine, cool purity of a white garden is your intention. The secret is to have just enough white among masses of green of many different shades, and no more. The white flowers should ride the waves of green like the surf rather than swamp it like snowfall.

COLOUR AFFECTS MOOD

Colours set the emotional mood as much as any other factor. Walking in the Jewel Garden in high summer is like plugging into the mains, charging and recharging all aesthetic batteries with direct energy.

But just a few yards away – separated by the cool green corridor of the Long Walk – the Cottage Garden positively wallows in pastel tones. Mauve, lilac, lemon, pinks of every hue and soft blues combine in an easy jumble of soft shades. This inevitably means that it’s a gentle place, short on drama and energy but long on peace and relaxation.

Some colours are always marginal. Black – such as found in the evergreen perennial Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’ – is fun but tricky, while the black silhouette of bare branches against a winter sky has a stark, gaunt beauty. Orange can be very right with other ‘hot’ colours but also glaringly wrong. And some yellows just don’t seem to work with anything.

Magenta is interesting. A plant like the perennial geranium ‘Anne Folkard’, with its lemon-green foliage and magenta flowers that run almost like a climber through neighbouring plants, is brilliant in our Jewel Garden for adding energy to almost everything around it. But planted among pink roses, it seems crass and crude. Try things. Sooner or later you find what colours work as and when you want them to in your garden.

The colour of hard surfaces really matters, too. Treat them with the same care as you would any flower in a border. Keep them subtle and muted but where possible, also warm.

It’s the colour as much as anything else that makes Yorkstone or Cotswold stone so alluring.

Fences can and often should be painted but are best acting as a cohesive backdrop rather than a coloured feature in their own right.

Shades of grey, green and pink can work well but blue is usually aggressively dominant.