How to Ruin Colours in the Garden in 6 Lessons by Francis Peeters

Hoping you have followed Michael's advice on failing to plant your perennials, let’s now explore how to fail at colour combinations to ruin the few plants that may have survived in your garden!

Lesson 1: Do not consider the background to test the chameleon theory.

It goes without saying that it is better to plant a white clematis against a white background. According to the very zen abstract concept "less is more", this allows you to distinguish, among other things, the thickness of the air between the flower and its support, especially if you have the brilliant idea of systematically removing the leaves that appear. This idea came to me during a visit to a conceptual exhibition describing the ascent of Mont Blanc by polar bears.

It goes without saying that you will achieve the same result with red flowers on a brick wall or a band of Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’ along a black paving border.

In these three cases, the chameleon theory works perfectly... You can, if you feel like it, regularly repaint your wall to test it with numerous plants!

We often forget to integrate architecture and elements related to colourful plantings. But if you really don’t understand contemporary art, think about this.

Do you like grasses? Why not integrate them with rattan furniture whose colour harmonises with the stems and flowers?

You also don’t plant the same plants depending on whether the path is paved with bricks, black slate slabs, or yellow gravel.

If your neighbour's wall is blue, why not play Van Gogh by using yellow-green flowers like euphorbias, with a curtain of Foeniculum vulgare behind Achillea filipendula?

"Starry Night" Vincent van Gogh - Euphorbia, Foeniculum vulgare, Achillea filipendulina

By integrating the surrounding architecture, you make it an ally, which makes the garden appear larger than it actually is and more harmonious. The two go hand in hand, and distinguishing the home from the outside is, I hope, a Western concept that belongs to the past.

Lesson 2: Avoid yellow, orange, and red

It is well known that strong colours can only attract vulgar people, even if it must be acknowledged that those who dress in Desigual never get sauce stains on their dresses.

Nothing beats Laura Ashley wallpaper catalogues for finding inspiration that will transform your garden into a sweet shop that only Euro Disney can rival. ‘Let it go’ from these garish dahlias, and the garden finally regains its deserved calm.

Come on, you’re not going to be fooled by these outdated ideas, are you?

Of course, subtle colours have their place. But nothing beats strong colours, skillfully balanced, to awaken your sleepy flowerbeds.

Step out of your baby pink - boy blue cocoon and embark on an adventure. Of course, the usual compositions are reassuring but unfortunately often uninspiring.

That doesn’t mean you should banish your favourite colours. It’s simply about warming them up a bit. A mauve agapanthus may be stunning, but if you plant thirty of them side by side, the scene borders on a funeral atmosphere. Just add five or six sulphur-yellow flowers, and Jesus rises from the dead.

Try this simple test: with your hand, cover the yellow spikes of the Verbascum. Isn’t it immediately more boring? Photo: John Swithinbank – MAP

No, red, yellow, and orange are not vulgar. You just need to know how to balance their intensity and quantity. Autumn won’t say otherwise.

Lesson 3: Colours allow for a low-maintenance garden.

The eye is inevitably drawn to bright colours.

A red flower advances while a blue one recedes.

If you plant many red flowers in your small garden, you will feel it is tiny, and it seems that from then on, the maintenance work is reduced to its simplest expression. Thanks to the shrinking red.

However, if you are one of those who believe that a little effort in the garden constitutes the daily oxygen bubble that allows you to recharge, apply this principle: you will gain depth if you place blue or mauve flowers at the back of the small garden, as these colours open up space. From your veranda window, you will feel like you are in Versailles (don’t dream, I’m only talking about perspective).

Conversely, to minimise maintenance in a large garden, you can try endless masses of pale flowers. The eye glides over these large uniform expanses as if there were nothing interesting to look at, an empty space devoid of meaning. And it is well known that emptiness requires no maintenance.

Garden enthusiasts will prefer this alternative: plant small groups of strong colours at a respective distance that will act as exclamation points guiding the visitor on their walk. A book needs punctuation to exist. The same goes for the garden.

Lesson 4: An excess of pure colours keeps mothers-in-law at bay

Use primary colours above all. It will save you a flight to Rio in February. And in doing so, you will compete with the Chinese, of whom it is said that the Great Wall is the only human achievement visible from the moon.

More seriously, don’t be fooled by the term 'primary' or 'pure' when talking about a colour. By definition, they cannot be obtained by mixing and therefore share nothing with their neighbours.

Leave the 'pure' to the painters and mix instead tertiary colours made up of several tones. Once again, autumn colours provide the best example.

Red, yellow, and orange then juxtapose seamlessly as each incorporates a bit of the other two in varying doses. A tomato red, for example, is slightly orange and will therefore pair much better with an orange flower. Replace it with a bluish madder red, and things become complicated.

Lesson 5: If you are afraid of failing with colours, don’t use any.

In this case, follow the adage: light colours in full sun and dark colours in the shade.

Everything disappears, and you enter the fourth dimension. Absence of form, absence of sound, the interstellar void that perhaps opens the door to unsuspected worlds.

Come on, come back down to Earth and leave Mr Spock to explore unknown galaxies.

You don’t garden the same way in the shade or in the sun, in Lille or in Singapore. You may love pastel colours where white, mauve, and pink are mixed in varying doses. All this works wonderfully at latitudes where greyness is common or in flowerbeds sheltered by the shadow of a wall.

In this case, these subtle shades awaken because the slightest detail, the slightest variation in intensity is easily spotted.

Transpose the whole thing to the sun, and nothing works anymore. Strong light flattens or burns these pretty tones into an infamous wash that the eye can no longer distinguish.

the same flowerbed, with different lighting

Do I really need to explain why the high nobility of a dark purple flower completely fades in the shade? You’ve understood, the eye likes to be stimulated or it gets bored.

In the same vein, when you create a monochrome flowerbed, the big mistake would be to use identical values. You need to vary the saturation: use light and dark shades of the same colour grouped in patches, creating areas of shadow and light as if a cloud partially obscured the sun.

Lesson 6: To master colour in the garden, you must absolutely integrate all the rules of the colour wheel,

... and have attended a cycle of 20 lectures on Impressionist painters and perfectly understood the law of simultaneous contrast of colours as stated by the chemist Chevreul. Only then will you possibly begin to succeed with colour in the garden.

Michel Eugène Chevreul and his colour wheel

Come on, loosen up a bit. Rules are made to be broken, especially if they haven’t been stated by you.

The garden is a matter of personal taste, and as long as you feel good in it… don’t change a thing.

However, if you happen to visit a place where the mix of colours attracts you and makes you think, "I would like to do this or that at home, but I don’t know where to start", then you are ready to explore a fascinating world that requires only a smidgen of prior knowledge, a bit of feeling, and just the right amount of whimsy.

Photo: GAP - Robert Mabic