Color in Your Garden: Blue, Yellow, and Reds

A garden with a well-orchestrated color scheme is like a great painting. Using contrasting and complementary color design, anyone can give pizzazz to their flower borders. ‘Colour, which is fleeting, gives a planting its character, like the expression on a face. Playing with colour in a garden is the nearest most of us will ever come to painting.’ So writes Mary Keen, a garden consultant and designer and garden writer.

Enhance the Design of Your Plantings With Colourful Plants

Most of us learned when we were in school something about the color wheel with its three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue from which all other colors are derived. The secondary colors, orange, green and purple are formed from mixing two of the primary colors. And then there are the tertiary colors made from one secondary and one primary. The color wheel has been used by gardeners for decades.

One of the most important gardeners, ever, was an English woman named Gertrude Jekyll. She was also a painter and she spent years perfecting a system of using color in her garden. As a trained artist, she mixed colors in her plantings in much the same way as an artist mixes color on a palette, creating vibration, harmony, and contrasts. (She preferred, however, to use color to create harmony rather than contrast.) Claude Monet, the famous French Impressionist painter used his color ideas in his great garden in Giverny, in France. And it was another painter, Van Gogh, who said that ‘when you paint blue, paint yellow and orange as well’ because of the naturally occurring contrast that arises from using complementary colors together.

Basic Complementary Color Schemes Used in Gardens

Especially when first starting out, the color combination of blue and orange (or yellow) works very well. In herbaceous borders in mid-June the stunning combination of China-blue delphiniums standing stately beside yellow kniphofia (like red hot pokers only yellow) is an eye-catching picture that holds the attention of the viewer like a vibrant harmony played on the flute and cello. Blue ceanothus against a wall intermingled with a climbing yellow rose delivers a soft, soothing effect. Yellow and blue pansies are a favorite for annual combination as well as argentums and yellow or orange marigolds.

A Really Strong Color Combination for Mid-summer is Red and Blue

By mixing red oriental poppies with blue anchusa, or blue columbine, or blue campanulas a spectacular sense of artistry is achieved. Red and blue makes a bold impact if you like high drama in your garden. (In spring, red tulips under-planted with plenty of grape hyacinths achieves the same effect.) Red as a color can really shake up life in the garden and inject vitality into any planting. Sometimes it needs to be tempered with greens or whites, or softened by purples. It tends to bring things into closer view and foreshorten a vista. To make your garden feel expansive use blue flowers because blue is a receding color and will give the effect of spaciousness in the garden.

At Sissinghurst Castle Garden in Kent, England there is an all-white garden designed by the writer Vita Sackville-West and it remains one of the most famous gardens in the world with plantings of only white flowers, using roses and clematis, lilies, delphiniums, and foxgloves against silver and green foliage. Towards dusk, when the light is low, this combination of white and green makes a lasting impression on the viewer with a kind of luminosity like moonlight.

No matter what color scheme is used, be it bold with hot colors like red and orange, or subdued with silver and white and green, the use of color in the garden will add new life to flower borders. All gardeners are artists at heart. Like a child with a new box of crayons, creating with color and plants is a worthwhile design feature of any garden.