Secrets of a COLOURFUL GARDEN
Use the right plants and you can enjoy flowers, foliage and berries all year long – Nick Bailey shows you how
Part 3 Interest through every season
Year-round colour is something that many of us struggle to achieve in our gardens. But the good news is that it’s possible! In fact, I’d go as far as to say that you can have any colour you can think of in any month of the year, with the right mix of plants. By putting together a combination of long-flowering plants, ever-coloured foliage species and plants that change their colour palette through the year, it’s possible to have 365 days of colour. Follow my guide to creating non-stop, season-bridging colour with a carefully composed combination of flowers, foliage, bark and fruit.
Simplicity itself
For all the complexities and range of plant colours, it might surprise you to discover that the majority of these hues come from just four basic pigments. These are mixed and blended by plants to generate the thousands of subtly different colours that we get to play with on our plots.
The four pigments are carotenoids (orange), anthocyanins (red, purple and blue), xanthophylls (yellow) and finally chlorophyll, which of course gives us green. These pigments are distributed through different parts of the plant, leading to colour-rich petals, sepals, fruits, stems and leaves. As much as we get to enjoy these colours on our plots as gardeners, their reason for being is usually either attraction for pollinators or deterrent for hungry herbivores.
Plant colours do not remain the same, either. Petals fade and pale, fruits mature through many tones and autumn leaves reveal orange and yellow pigments that have been hidden by chlorophyll during the growing season. It’s these dynamic changes that provide us with some of the most useful garden plants in terms of bridging colour gaps between seasons.
I have a particular set of species that I use in a huge proportion of the gardens I design. I call them the 365-day plants. Not because they are necessarily evergreen or non-stop flowering, but because they continue to change their colour palette all through the year. One such plant is Nandina domestica. It’s a columnar shrub with evergreen leaves and a slightly arching habit to its upper growth. The reason it’s such a useful 365-day plant is that it does different things at different times of the year. In spring it produces pink-and-orange new foliage, shortly followed by panicles of small, white flowers. During summer these become pale fruits, but when autumn arrives the fruits turn a vibrant crimson, which is
accompanied by flushes of red-and-orange autumn leaves. Yes, you read that right! Unusually, this evergreen also musters autumn colours, while retaining most of its leaves. These vibrant leaf colours accompany the berries through winter, meaning that across four seasons this useful shrub is constantly upping the ante with its ever-changing colour palette. This in turn can provide a backdrop to a succession of different plant species.
Other garden plants with year-round, ever-changing colour palettes include Heptacodium miconioides and Cotoneaster ‘Cornubia’. The heptacodium has sickleshaped mid-green leaves which take on autumn colours – when this happens they in turn show off the pink calyces that held the white flowers for much of summer. But this large shrub has another trick up its sleeve – beautiful, peeling, cream-coloured bark. Like the nandina, the cotoneaster is an evergreen, but with autumn colour from its foliage, flowers in spring and berries in autumn and winter.
Using plants such as these gives you a good backbone of season-bridging fruits, flowers and foliage, but to ensure year-round colour other sets of plants are needed, too. Vital to your twelve-month armoury of colour are ever-coloured plants. In other words, plants that retain their foliage yearround but aren’t necessarily green.
Some of these ever-coloured species are a little bright for my liking. Plants such as Choisya ternata Sundance has strongyellow foliage, which can feel a little extreme in winter. There is, however, a wonderful range of ever-coloured shrubs with more gentle colours that look vibrant year-round. A favourite of mine is Hebe ‘Heartbreaker’. It has beautiful pink, purple, cream and green foliage which feels summer-fresh every month of the year. Another useful plant is Pittosporum tenuifolium, which carries vibrant, palegreen foliage through the seasons. I love it for its fresh green tones, which provide a delicious contrast to the heavier, inky evergreens, such as yew and box, that many of us have in our gardens. And despite
This useful shrub is constantly upping the ante with its ever-changing colour palettes
my dislike of the strong-yellow choisya there is a New Zealand shrub with a much more subtle pale-yellow tone to its ever-coloured leaves – I adore compact Pseudowintera colorata for its butter-yellow leaves with gorgeous pink margins.
There is also a huge range of evercoloured ferns and grasses that do a great job at providing vibrant year-round colour, so it’s well worth researching these.
Flowers forever
Finally, to bridge multiple seasons and keep the colour coming it’s worth introducing some non-stop flowering plants. These are few and far between, but those that muster it are magical. Take Rosa ‘Bengal Crimson’ for example. This single, red rose grows to about 2.5m in height and blooms non-stop 12 months of the year. It’s virtually miraculous but it really never stops. Hot on its heel is Anisodontea ‘El Rayo’ from South Africa. This mallow relative reaches some 3m and flowers heavily nearly all year with its mid-pink flowers centred with a burgundy blotch. Or, if you are looking for something more compact to keep the colour coming, then consider one of the perennial wallflowers. Erysimum Winter Orchid (orange and violet) or
E. ‘Bowles’s Mauve’ (mauve) flower relentlessly across all the seasons.
By combining 365-day plants, evercoloured plants and non-stop flowering species it’s fairly easy to ensure year-round colour. The next thing to master is mixing these plants with others to show off their colours further still. How about the pinkypurple Hebe ‘Heartbreaker’ with a plummy heuchera? Or adding a golden backdrop to your mauve wallflower with the rich blades of Libertia peregrinans? The options are endless and you could even group together several plants to highlight the different tones of your chosen species as their colours change across the seasons. So, what are you waiting for? Get planting and turn your plot into a riot of non-stop colour.
Non-stop flowering plants are very rare, but those that muster it are magical