FEEL ENERGISED

Have you ever walked into a garden on a day when worries seem uppermost in your mind and then, as you wander around, your mood changes and you begin to feel more optimistic, more upbeat?

If the sun is shining all the better, though it may well be the use of colour that lifts your mood. Kaleidoscopic planting schemes, with saturated colour in big drifts and injections of opposite colour, set the whole picture alight.

Sheets of blue Michaelmas daisies interspersed with orange echinaceas and glowing kniphofias or even late-flowering marigolds – pot, French or African – are lit up.

Red dahlias seem all the more vibrant side by side, or preferably all mixed up, with lime-green spurge or Nicotiana langsdorffii. Yellow and purple together make your retinas tingle, but all the more so if you lighten the colour that is usually darkest, until it has the same tonal value as the colour that is usually the paler one. Imagine you are taking a black-and-white photograph of the two – when you look at the picture you cannot tell them apart; they are both the same grey.

A phlox of palest lilac, such as

P. paniculata ‘Eventide’ alongside brilliant yellow rudbeckia will zing, but not only that, it will lift your spirits, too.