USING COLOUR
in your garden
It shouldn’t be a surprise that colour is among the most immediate of senses; our past lives as hunter gatherers conditioned us to look out for bright berries to help keep us from going hungry. Yet despite its pre-eminence in our perceptions of our surroundings, the garden-design profession finds it very hard to think about colour in new and interesting ways, and often feels stuck in a rut. Vita Sackville-West’s ‘white garden’ at Sissinghurst or the ‘hot border’ at Hidcote were interesting ideas in their time but have been so widely replicated that they have descended into cliché. As designers, our approach to colour must go beyond the colour wheel. In developing my theory of colour I have looked outside of gardening to fine art, architecture, fashion and interior design.
Colourist Pierre Bonnard’s paintings [some of which you can currently see for yourself at the Royal Academy’s Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse exhibition] are of simple domestic scenes; a view out of a window, a corner of a kitchen table or a woman in a bath. Each scene appears to be flooded in dazzling, iridescent colour, reminding us of the transformative power of light. In his painting, as in life, colour is changed by colours and light around them. Take a piece of white paper: on its own it looks pure white, but place it next to snow and it appears grey. In bright sunlight white flowers appear bleached out and their delicate details flattened, yet in low twilight they appear luminous. An exterior wall painted in dark taupe can look white in sunlight yet an earthy brown on a dark, misty day.
Interior designers have the freedom to choose any colour they want for a paint, and can colour match to any object, be it fabric, metal or a background detail of a painting. We gardeners