Go bold with perennials: best hot colours to give your borders a boost
Hazel Sillver recommends a selection of perennials to plant now that will add a touch of heat to your borders, plus how to plant with less intense colours
IT’S often the brightly coloured flowers, rather than the pale pastel shades, that catch our eye in gardens. With the sun igniting them, their intense colours can be breathtaking. Prime examples of these colourful creations are the ruby-scarlet
Crocosmia ‘Hellfire’ or the deep-purple Iris ‘Dusky Challenger’.
Yet while most of us love these heartening, punchy colours, they can be hard to use in a garden border. Unlike softer pastel shades, these colours stand out. The fiery colours draw the eye and tend to dominate the landscape. This is especially true of fiery shades such as yellow.
The English author and garden designer Vita Sackville-West had an answer to this problem – she decided to plant a garden full of nothing but fiery colour. Her Cottage Garden (or the Sunset Garden, as she called it) at Sissinghurst, in Kent, is composed entirely of orange, red and yellow flowers. This indulgence of warmth and fire is wonderful, but it may not be very practical in the average garden.
Colour throughout the border
For the rest of us, the best way to handle bright colour is usually to dot it through borders, rather than having lots of bold hues together. When each blast of colour is surrounded by less intensity, the effect is marvellous.
For example, you could trying using scarlet (such as Lychnis chalcedonica) with claret flowers; hot pink (such as
Salvia microphylla ‘Cerro Potosí’) with soft-blue blooms; and melting gold (such as Hemerocallis ‘Burning Daylight’) with lime foliage or flaxen grasses.
Planting in this way shows off the bright colours of the perennials, but prevents them from being over the top. The loud, brash stronger colours are tempered by those that are less intense.
Yet not all eye-catching colours are overly dominant. Navy-indigo flowers (such as Delphinium Black Knight Group and Aconitum ‘Spark’s Variety’) and chocolate-maroon blooms (such as
Alcea rosea ‘Nigra’ and Gladiolus ‘Espresso’) smoulder with elegance and pair well with bright colours. And lilaccoloured plants (such as Aster x frikartii ‘Mönch’) dazzle without burning.
Spring is an ideal time to plant colourful perennials to make the garden more cheering in summer and beyond. Plan well now by planting late-blooming brights, such as sun-yellow Rudbeckia
laciniata ‘Herbstsonne’ and vermillion Dahlia ‘Bishop of Llandaff’, to cast off the gloom of autumn with splashes of flaming colour.