Colour your garden happy with our tips for combining shades, tints and tones successfully in your planting schemes
Want a cool, minimalist courtyard, or a soothing spa-like sanctuary? Or, perhaps you’d prefer a fizzy tropical paradise for your patio, complete with palms? While these descriptions might sound miles apart, they have one key element in common – colour.
Used correctly, colour can turn a garden from muddle to Monet. It can create different moods, space, lighting and impact.
And it’s not just achieved by flowers. Painted garden ‘furniture’ (fences, sheds or patio chairs) can all add different shades. And foliage – whether deciduous or evergreen – can bring a kaleidoscope of different tints and tones too.
But just like choosing wallpaper or gloss for your interiors, the exterior scheme needs careful design consideration. And that’s where our Cambridge gardeners can help.
As highly-experienced gardeners, we know how to incorporate colours together. We know how to mix palettes successfully and use colour in different parts of the garden to create distinct areas.
Through our work across Cambridge gardens, we’ve devised hundreds of ways to help clients visualise colour in their gardens.
Here are our top tips for showing your true colours…
Pruple and blue can create a calming atmosphere in your garden
Choosing the right colours for your garden
A collection of three tones generally works best in practice. Just as a vibrant red lipstick doesn’t suit all complexions – not all colours will suit all gardens.
Dark hues, for example, such as purple and blue, will create a calming atmosphere. These are best used for those places you’d like to unwind. They also tend to make areas look larger so are great if you have a smaller garden.
By contrast, bright colours draw attention. These are best avoided near a compost heap or utility area, but are fantastic in socialising areas such as patios or decking.
We also work a lot with neutrals, such as white, black and green, and use these to tone down other colours or buffer plants that might clash.
Clever plant palette mixing
Whites are also almost fluorescent at night and this is wonderful if you entertain a lot in the evenings. But they also help ‘cool’ hot areas, such as south-facing patios.
While you might already be using monochromes in your landscape – combining shades of a single colour together – we love to give twists on the colour wheel by using ‘analogous’ colours together.
These colours, next to each other on the colour wheel (such as red and orange), blend together and create harmonious schemes. This can create warm and cool looks that are rich in texture. This is the kind of colour scheme you might see naturally occurring in the wild. Just think of the stunning sight of autumnal leaves on an avenue of beech trees.
Bulbs such as alliums can add a splash of colour in spring and early summer
Extending garden colour year-round
As trained horticulturalists, we can create stylish shades through flowers and foliage. And planting is the key to our clever colour coding. With deep-rooted local knowledge, we’ve helped the owners of some of Cambridge’s most spectacular homes inject colour into their gardens all year round – even in winter.
Our exceptional plant expertise allows us to demonstrate how, simply but effectively, you can bring colour into the early part of the year with spring bulbs. Tubers (such as anemone), corms (such as crocus), rhizomes (Lily of the Valley) or true bulbs (tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, grape hyacinths and alliums) are a powerhouse of colour waiting to pop. Either naturalise in grass or plant in giant swathes. They’re also lovely in containers of ‘mobile’ colour that can be moved around to brighten up dark spots.
And what of those dark spots? We’re often asked what can be done for shady areas. Here we can design planting schemes that really add zing, such as potted rhododendrons or hellebores, heucheras, pulmonaria, hostas and bergenias.
Colourful foliage can brighten up shady areas, especially earlier in the year
Injecting colour into your autumn and winter garden
Autumn offers a technicolour dreamcoat of shades with deciduous trees and shrubs. We love acers, Cotinus, Amelanchier, prunus and Daphne for their fragrance, flowers and fantastic foliage. And we’re also a big fan of berries, and not just for the wonderful array of wildlife they can support.
If you’re a fan of Anglesey Abbey and the Cambridge Botanic gardens, you may have come across the coloured stems of winter cornus with shades of olive green, red, orange. And you can’t miss the ghostly white stems of betula utilis (Himilayan birch).
We can help find standout spots for winter stalwarts such as pyracantha, cotoneaster and holly. Or select more unusual shrubs such as callicarpa (or ‘Beauty Bush’), with its profusion of purple pearl-like berries.
Contrasting colours can bring a modern, vibrant feel to your garden
Be adventurous with colour
Of course, as expert Cambridge gardeners we don’t just stick to the obvious. We’ve helped many of our clients tune into their adventurous side.
We can inject vibrancy and excitement into your garden with a clever palette of contrasting colours. Think pink anemones with orange California poppies or a sunset yellow bench against a sky blue fence. These schemes can offer a more modern take on plant design.
Whatever colours you choose, from consultation to the plant design and maintenance, we promise: your garden will never feel off colour again.