You know hue
Pick shades to gladden your heart
GET creative and experiment with colour outside your home as well as in.
Flower shades can be vivid or soft, with displays able to lift your spirits or help you relax.
A container filled with a single type of flower in one colour will always look stylish. White flowers are the perfect antidote to dull days, encouraging feelings of calm and optimism.
Zantedeschia aethiopica Crowborough has a cool elegance few plants can match. It produces large white funnel-shaped blooms above glossy leaves from spring. It will grow in partial shade and moist soil, so can be set in the damp soil around a pond.
Eucomis bicolor, right, is one of the most unusual plants you can grow. It is known as the pineapple lily because of its little green-tinted flowers with a crest of young leaves on top that resemble a pineapple. Grow it in a pot on a sunny patio. Despite the blooms smelling like cabbage, bees love it. Calm, cool pink and lilac shades are versatile colours, as they lose none of their intensity in full sun or deep shade. Use flowers in the pastel shades to pretty up a patio and give it a romantic feel with pots featuring gloriously scented Oriental lilies and Begonia Roy Hartley. It produces soft pink flowers up to 10cm wide all summer long. Also for pots or a hot, dry sunny border is Nerine bowdenii, left. Expect seven funnelshaped, slightly scented, pink flowers, each 7.5cm across, with wavy, recurved petals. Flowers appear in early autumn. Warm and welcoming, orange is a joy. Try cannas in terracotta pots to spice up purple or blue or calm down trendy white or lime green schemes. The exotic foliage of Canna lutea comes in shades of green, brown, burgundy or multicolored stripes. They produce tousled, gladiola-like blooms that flaunt themselves in pairs from mid-summer to autumn. And impress with Canna Durban, which has orange striped leaves and burnt orange flowers alongside dark-leaved Canna Purpurea.