Pointers to help you colour outside the lines with confidence.

Winter has had me gazing out on nearly monochromatic landscapes of snowdrifts, dignified native spruces, firs, and pine, interrupted by sculptured limbs of deciduous trees and shrubs, or the defiant seed-heads of perennials. We gardeners sit and dream about the coming months, when the bleaker shades give way to brilliant hues of spring.

We can’t resist colour. Unless we’re colourblind, tints and hues and tones inform every part of our waking existence, and nowhere is colour more inviting than in a garden setting.

Several garden writers have inspired my personal theory of colour, including the late, lamented Christopher Lloyd, English gentleman gardener. He advocated learning the so-called rules of colour, but only so that we might break them. That’s my kind of gardener! Taking that one step further, I don’t even recommend learning rules about harmonies and contrasts, primary and secondary hues. However, I do suggest you spend time thinking about what your favourite colours are, and which ones you don’t like—then try working with the following pointers in mind.

1. Plant in drifts rather than in dots. Think of a bed of snapdragons or pansies in a variety of colours. Up close, it’s easy to admire the individual colours of different flowers. But as you back away from that bed, you may find that the colours blur together and look muddy. Planting in drifts of colour—where you use all one shade of a particular variety in broad brushstrokes, rather than using the tip of your brush creating dots of colour—results in a more pleasing and powerful effect.
   
   As a bonus, a drift of one colour is useful in attracting different types of pollinators. Bees, especially, do not see the world as we do—they don’t see the colour red, for example, but are attracted to other colours including yellow and blue—and a jumble of colour will not attract them nearly as effectively as will drifts of goldenrods, sea hollies, or coneflowers in particular shades.
2. Repetition is a good thing. Some of the most effective plantings I’ve seen rely on repeating a particular colour and type of plant. I favour jewel-tones—rich purples, blues, oranges—in my beds, and tend to repeat those colours using monardas, sea hollies, and various types of rudbeckias. The repetition of colour will draw your eye around the garden.
3. Creating a colour theme. Colour-themed gardens can be very attractive, but with the exception of white, you may be challenged to find a variety of plants that have flowers whose colours are closely matched. Blue flowers, in particular, are hard to work with because there aren’t many true blue species; many plants labelled as having “blue” flowers more accurately have blooms in shades of purple.
   
   Even planting an all-white garden may offer a surprise or two—unless you purchase the plants when they are in bloom, thereby knowing for sure that they have white flowers. I fondly remember visiting a garden that had an all-white bed…except for one plant that had a paper bag over its blooms. The owner had purchased something that was supposed to have white flowers, and instead it had flamboyant orange blossoms—a trifle glaring in her tranquil white bed!
4. Plan for all seasons. Now is a good time to think about creating winter interest for next year. You can do this by adding shrubs with a bright winter twig colour, or choose from the wealth of colourful evergreens. One of my favourite conifers is the golden-copper ‘Sunkist’ cedar, which lights up its area of the garden at any time of the year, but especially in winter.
   
   You’ll often hear gardeners lamenting about a lack of colour in high summer, when the big bloom of perennials and flowering shrubs is past. Of course, there are many late-blooming plants available: choose ironweed (Vernonia), turtlehead (Chelone), helenium, toad lilies (Tricyrtis), Joe-Pye weed (Eupatorium) and late-flowering grasses such as maidengrass (Miscanthus), switchgrass, and big bluestem (Panicum and Andropogon).
5. Don’t forget your veggies. Gardeners sometimes incorporate vegetables and fruits into their flowering plantings, which can add a different dimension of colour. Many colourful vegetables are available for home gardeners—from purple cauliflower and beans, to yellow tomatoes and rainbow chard. Along with adding bursts of colour to your garden, they can be a great way to entice children to get into gardening—and into eating their veggies.
6. Create a cutting bed. Many of us like to display cut flowers in our homes, and if you’ve grown plants from seed or purchased transplants of annuals such as pansies, zinnias and snapdragons, they are apt to be in a mixture of flower colours. Consider making a dedicated cutting bed, set apart from other beds with more formal colour themes.
7. Remember that foliage has colour. When people say their gardens have no colour in late summer, I remind them that green is a colour—and that there are many shades of green. However, due to the whimsies of plant breeders, foliage is no longer restricted to green: some plants have foliage in shades of copper, silver, yellow, bronze, wine, white, pink and blue, often combined with green to produce variegated foliage.

One of my favourite plants is ‘Diabolo’ ninebark (Physocarpus), which has deep wine leaves, commanding great attention when visitors come to my garden. The shrub is surrounded by flowers such as daylilies, roses, echinaceas, and lilies, in bright and light hues, providing a pleasing contrast and view—and isn’t that why we garden?