Landscape Garden Color
Planned Design Generates Unified Appearance
Landscape gardens with coordinated color present unified appearances and pleasing public images. Using color in the garden landscape calls for basic guiding principles.
Overview
Planned design and placement of plants within a landscape garden presents a unified appearance and public image. Four-season or year-round landscape color is easy to achieve. Success, however, emerges slowly over time. Patience is necessary.
Successful use of color in the garden landscape calls for a few guiding principles. Following these basic guidelines, while not being a slave to them, leads to a feeling and look of accomplishment. Continuing success with landscape color requires frequently checking these guidelines so the process stays trouble-free.
Using Color
- Choose plants that offer more than one season of color. Catalogs from reputable nurseries usually incorporate charts detailing distinctive characteristics of their plants. Unfortunately, landscape gardeners often choose plants for only one season of spectacular leaf color or flowers, or ease of maintenance.
- Capture color from well thought-out plant choices to complement and harmonize with buildings, existing vegetation, and landscape garden sites. The white color of a traditional New England home and flaming red maple leaves work well together and create a simple but eye-catching front yard landscape. The same tree planted in a similar position adjacent to a red brick colonial home is either lost because the colors blend, or they unattractively conflict.
- Decide on a scheme with two or three primary colors and stick to it. It is difficult to find plants and their parts in pure primary colors, but tones and tints and their hues and shades abound. Schemes incorporating a wide range of primary colors and their subtle variations are usually enjoyable and pleasing not only to the landscape gardener, but also to the household, visitors and casual passersby. It is also possible using meticulous deliberation to plan restful and dainty landscapes in pastel colors, as well as fanciful and playful landscapes in bright forceful and dynamic ones.
How to Begin
Purchase or download from the Internet an inexpensive color wheel (color circle). A color wheel, based on red, yellow and blue, is a time-honored tool for artists. It is also a valuable as well as enjoyable tool for landscape gardeners to own and use. The color wheel demonstrates in an uncomplicated manner an understandable arrangement of fundamental colors. Colors and their arrangement and relation to each other will emerge as consistent and logical parts of landscape gardeners’ worlds by exploring and using the color wheel.
The Primary Colors
Primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. In this group are the hottest-feeling, colors red and yellow, and the coolest color, blue.
For most people, just thinking about these red and yellow colors together brings sensations of blazing sunshine and intense scorching. Red and yellow used together also equal excitement or when muted, autumn. The south-facing Cottage Garden at Sissinghurst Castle Garden (Kent, England) is a good example of an abundance of hot colors. However, many people feel uncomfortable in this garden for that reason.
Red and yellow can also be used singly or together to:
- focus attention on an attractive garden feature,
- divert attention from an unattractive feature, or
- convey a mood or feeling.
Bright red doors draw attention to the entrance in an emphatic, but attractive way. They indicate clearly, "This is the way inside." Ripe red apples stop viewers' eyes and attract admiration. Because the apples draw attention, there is little, if any, attention paid to what might lurk behind the apple tree.
Yellow used by itself usually means caution, concern or most often, cheerfulness. The first yellow spring daffodils and forsythia suggest the warmth and happiness of springtime. Few passersby can avoid feeling cheerful and encouraged when seeing a planting of sunflowers.
Blue is a cool, or even cold, color. In the garden landscape plants of this color pass on feelings of calmness and restfulness. Blue with silver and white usually implies cleanliness, purity, and precision.
The easiest way to use blue in the garden landscape is by using plants with subtly variegated blue-white or blue-silver leaves and needles. Deep shades of blue, often found on autumn flowers, recede at dusk, and often we see a hole where a plant really grows. However, some designers advocate using blue to create a sense of distance.
©
Text and photograph by Georgene A. Bramlage. 2007. Reproduction without permission prohibited
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