Colour-coding the garden
by Vivienne Lewis
Autumn, being a time to do a spot of armchair gardening with books and catalogues, may have you planning changes in your flowerbeds and borders next spring.
Many catalogues are multi-coloured on every page, giving you eye strain as you quickly flick through them. The more you look at dahlias, roses, flowering shrubs and all those annuals, the more confused you become.
You may have a favourite colour, or shades of it. Then you think of gardens, or areas of gardens, where only one colour is used. That might work, you think. What about the White Garden at Sissinghurst (actually whites, silvers, and a lot of green as a foil, not to mention the wonderful structures, the ancient towers and walls).
There have been many imitations of the White Garden since Vita Sackville-West designed it in the 1950s – one of the garden ‘rooms’ at Barrington Court, near Ilminster, for instance. Perhaps it works best on a large scale.
wonderful gardener at Great Dixter in East Sussex, taught us that we should take risks and put all sorts of plants in different colours alongside each other, ripping out a rose garden to make way for exotic plantings. The revival of popularity of dahlias, once so out of fashion, owes much to him.
Colour coding at its most majestic – Hadspen garden in Somerset
The biggest colour-coded garden I have seen was at Hadspen, on the Hobhouse estate near Castle Cary, where Nori and Sandra Pope made a glorious garden in the kitchen garden area, with its circular walls dating from the 18th century.
At Hadspen you walked past great swathes of colour right through the spectrum, from yellows through to reds and back to yellows, with all shades in between, and then blues and greens in all their shades. It was a sumptuous garden in high summer, with narrows paths through tall plants, even the rows of vegetables and salads reflecting their colour themes.
But it was a good design, not overwhelming. It worked because there were ‘quiet’ areas to walk in, under trees and across lawns, by the large lily pond, and around the charming, tiny, former gardener’s cottage where teas and lunches were served.
The Popes wrote about their garden in Colour by Design, explaining how they saw colour in terms of music and mythology: blue was the precious colour of rare jewels and cool jazz, green the colour of Pan, god of life, and so on. They described how the garden’s colours change through the season, and they urged gardeners to be more adventurous in their choice of colourful annuals.
The White Garden at Barrington Court
Then there are blue gardens, yellow gardens, and areas of gardens devoted only to grasses and bamboos, shades of green going into autumn tints later in the year.
Sometimes one-colour gardens or borders are rather boring. Gertrude Jekyll liked to design long, lavish borders with gentler colours and white yuccas at either end, going into hot colours of orange and red in the middle – like a crescendo in a symphony.
Many people think you shouldn’t put some colours near each other, that it shows poor taste. Christopher Lloyd, the
After nearly two decades, the Popes returned to their native Canada in 2005. Owner Niall Hobhouse, son of design guru Penelope Hobhouse, chose to raze the garden to the ground rather than keep it going, and started a competition to find another design for the ‘Hadspen Parabola’ - the geometric term for the walled garden. It has sparked off much controversy, and so far there is no replacement for the colour garden which was hailed as the greatest of its type since Sissinghurst.
So, sadly that garden is gone, showing how transient even the best ones can be. If you can get hold of the book, it is full of information and ideas about plants and how to use colour in the garden.
Gardens are extensions of our personalities in the same way as we decorate and furnish our rooms indoors. Nobody should feel they have to put certain colours in their garden and reject others because it’s in poor taste.
Country Gardener 47
If it works for you, put oranges next to pink, or any colour combination you like. After all, it’s your garden
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