Plants and planting schemes
Colour
Creating a well planted garden is like painting a picture, but before you can begin to paint you must first mix your colours. To be a good designer of planting schemes it is essential that you are able to not only mix your colours well, but then be able to apply them to the canvass to create your masterpiece.
I am sure everyone is familiar with the colour wheel and I would like to explain a little more about how colour is best used.
The colour wheel is based on the primary colours - red, yellow and blue. It was Sir Isaac Newton who first developed the circular diagram of colours as far back as 1666 and since then artists have used it in the field of their art and, in the case of designing a planting scheme, the wheel is also a very useful tool to creating a harmonious design.
The primary colours - red, yellow and blue - are the three pigments that cannot be created by using any other colour combination. Instead, all other colours are derived from these three hues.
The secondary colours - orange, green and purple - are those that are formed by mixing the primary colours i.e. mix yellow and red to form orange; yellow and blue to form green and red and blue to form purple.
Then there are the tertiary colours, which are formed by mixing one primary and one secondary colour e.g. red (primary) and orange (secondary) combined make the tertiary colour red-orange; yellow and orange form yellow-orange and so on.
What is harmony?
Harmony is defined as a pleasing arrangement of parts, which can be applied to music and poetry and, in terms of colour, it engages the viewer by creating a pleasing visual experience.
There are, of course, different degrees of harmony - extreme unity is formed when using, say, too many greens together, which can produce a bland effect that is under-stimulating whereas placing too many colours together produces a chaotic complexity that is over-stimulating and one that is hard to look at for too long. What you should be aiming for in your planting schemes is a logical structure so that the end result can be delivered to the brain in an orderly fashion.
Colour illusion
The colour of your plants often dictates where they should be placed in your scheme. For instance, red is a colour that shouts out and if placed at the far end of the garden, it will have the effect of drawing the eye in and in turn making your garden seem smaller. Similarly, cool colours like blue and white recede so placed at the end of the garden they will increase the feeling of spaciousness. So, in summary, place hot colours close to the main viewing point of your plot and cool colours in the distance.
The Colourists
I have chosen the works of Gertrude Jekyll, Christopher Lloyd and Nori and Sandra Pope to demonstrate the art of using colour in the garden and in this section you will find links to their websites and to books, and I encourage you to visit their gardens to really understand what their art is all about.
Gertrude Jekyll is probably the most important gardener of the last century and still her planting style is a huge influence on garden design today. In the years since her death in 1932 landscape architects and designers have tried to come up with new ways to lay out gardens in the vain hope of creating the next thing in garden planning. Sadly for them, their designs have come and gone whereas the gardens of Gertrude Jekyll and those designers who have since followed her principles, still remain. The reason? Because she got it right and to date, her style has never been bettered.
She was an artist before she was a gardener, and it is clear from her schemes that her art background gave her an understanding of colour and a flair for mixing and then painting with those colours in the borders she created.
The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll by Richard Bisgrove (left) is an excellent reference book, in which her best planting schemes have been painstakingly re-drawn and water coloured from her original plans.
A visit to her own garden at Munstead Wood in Godalming, Surrey, is not to be missed, and will help you understand her planting philosophy. For details of opening times visit the official website of the Jekyll estate on www.gertrudejekyll.co.uk.
Interestingly enough, the University of Berkeley in the USA appear to own her original planting plans and these can be viewed, although the quality is poor, on their website www.ced.berkeley.edu/cedarchives/profiles/jekyll.
Christopher Lloyd has to some extent followed on in her tradition in his garden at Great Dixter, originally designed by Edwin Lutjens, who worked alongside Gertrude Jekyll, and where Chrisopher Lloyd has devoted his whole life to creating what is one of the most experimental and exciting gardens today. His planting style consists of everything from yew topiary to carpets of meadow flowers, exotic borders and the famous long border.
On the subject of colour he says “I have no segregated colour schemes. In fact, I take it as a challenge to combine every sort of colour effectively. I have a constant awareness of colour and what I am doing, but if I think a yellow candelabrum of mullein will look good rising from the middle of a quilt of pink phlox, I will put it there.”
He makes no bones about shocking people by placing vibrant pink alongside sulphur yellow, but then at his age - he is well into his 80’s - I suppose he is past caring.
But what he does also advocate is the use of foliage and so the mix of clashing colours is tempered by the use of architectural foliage plants like the large leaves of the banana or specimen grasses like Stipa gigantea used to great effect as accents, which punctuate the borders and give the viewer a breather from the dazzling display of colours.
Christopher Lloyd has written a wealth of books too numerous to mention, all of them hugely entertaining and educational. If ever I want to learn more about a plant I always first see what Christopher Lloyd has to say on the subject because I know that he speaks from his own personal experience as a gardener. Christopher Lloyd’s Garden Flowers (left) is the one I turn to most often because it is alphabetical and his plant descriptions are excellent and so too is his advice on which variety, in his opinion, may be better than another and why.
Knowing the writing of Christopher Lloyd well, I feel sure that the text on the Great Dixter website (www.greatdixter.co.uk) has been written by him personally. There is a plan of the gardens on the site that can be printed out and downloads of his planting principles are also available, together with information on the countless books he has written, and indeed is still writing as we speak.
Nori & Sandra Pope, who own and run Hadspen House in Somerset, are two of today’s leading exponents of colour in the garden. They have written several excellent books on the theory of colour and one in particular Planting with Colour is a book I recommend you read if you want to further your understanding of how to use it to best advantage in your garden.
This husband and wife team have indeed painted several masterpieces in the borders at Hadspen House and if you cannot visit the garden to see for yourselves, why not visit their website – www.hadspengarden.co.uk
The female of the species …
Did you know that men see colour differently to women? According to the Pope’s in their book Planting with Colour, men are better able than women to see in the dark or in low light, whereas women can better appreciate the soft blush of a rose. “Women store visual information on both sides of their brain, men on one side only; this gives men better depth perception, but at the price of colour recall, which is easier for women. Ten percent of men are functionally colour blind, and almost none has the selective capacity of a woman’s eye”. I leave it to you to decide who, in your household, should mix the colours and who should create the masterpiece!