Control the clashers
Create bold summer borders with orange, pink and red
“Orange, a colour avoided by so many, lights up summer”
When colours clash, they create energy and excitement but it’s better to limit hotter hues with perhaps just a touch of orange or a splash of hot-pink with bright-blue or purple. In spring the fiery heads and olive-green foliage of Euphorbia griffithii ‘Dixter’ can liven up a shady spot by clashing with bright pink bergenias such as ‘Overture’. In summer use the fully double, brightpink-to-magenta campion, Lychnis coronaria ‘Gardeners’ World’. This produces small rosettes above silvery foliage and doesn’t self seed. Team it with bright-blue spires of Veronica longifolia ‘Marietta’. Lots of dahlias have dark, sultry foliage and a toning planting of the evergreen black strappy Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’ works well at their feet. Low-growing ‘Totally Tangerine’, has masses of soft-orange double flowers (page 26); clash the dayglo whirligigs of ‘Waltzing Mathilda’ (p25) with hot-pinks and purples; or contrast deep-blue Verbena rigida with purple decorative dahlia ‘Thomas A. Edison’.
Reds tend to arrive later in the year and are made far more dramatic with a purple or blue companion. Woven through almost-black red dahlias such as ‘Sam Hopkins’ or ‘Karma Choc’, slender Verbena bonariensis, looks irresistible. In a shady spot, tall, purple and red hardy fuchsia ‘Mrs Popple’, could be clashed with bright pink Japanese anemone ‘Pamina’, harmonised with softer Anemone hybrida ‘September Charm’ or cooled by green-centred pure-white ‘Honorine Jobert’. Orange, a colour avoided by so many, lights up summer and vivid crocosmias also provide sword-shaped leaves that endure into winter. The salmon pink-to-orange ‘Severn Sunrise’, which looks like shot silk under late summer sun, is a smaller crocosmia. The new Firestars series includes ‘Scorchio’ – a taller, vibrant stripy orange and yellow. Or you could go tomato-red with Julyf lowering ‘Lucifer’, which is worth growing for its bright-green pleated foliage alone. Echinacea purpurea ‘Fatal Attraction’ or salvia ‘Love and Wishes’ could provide extra bright-pink devilment used with orange. ➤