Five top tips – growing plants for colour and impact
Garden designer Arit Anderson shares her top tips for growing plants with colour and impact.
Year-round colour is one of the most common requests for garden designers. We love the challenge, because planting for on-going seasonal impact means we get to be playful. Often gardeners lose confidence with colour, and limit their planting, but are then disappointed with the result. The joy of experimenting helps us become bolder with our choices. And if it doesn’t work? There’s always next year.
Successional planting
Keeping colour going in your garden is known as successional planting. The idea is to choose plants that come into bloom when another has faded. For this to work, planning is crucial. Take your time looking through magazines and websites and make a plant list, making notes of when plants will flower throughout the months, and plan your borders accordingly.
Regular deadheading
For long-lasting colour, it’s important to look for plants that are long flowering. Many of these will produce more blooms with regular deadheading. Dahlias will keep giving colour and impact right up to the first frosts, and I’ve found I get so much more from my roses and penstemons when I cut the spent flowers.
Using complementary colours
Choosing colours that are on the opposite side of the colour wheel will complement each other, by making the other seem brighter. I like to do this to create energy in my schemes. I combined Phlox divaricata ‘Clouds of Perfume’ with Geum 'Mrs J Bradshaw' in this simple but highly effective container.
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- How to improve your colour combinations
Make a statement
Bold colour comes from planting bold, en masse. Tulips are wonderful when planted in this way – one or two colour combinations can deliver great impact. I love using bright orange Tulipa ‘Ballerina’ with the dark, sultry purple Tulipa ‘Queen of the Night’ to achieve a border full of drama. It’s not just bulbs that work in swathes, you can also plant groups of annuals and perennials together – use at least three plants in a group to make a statement.
Colour beyond flowers
It's really important to think of colour in your garden coming from the whole plant. In winter, bark is a great way to introduce colour. Prunus serrula, with its shiny bronze bark, or vibrant dogwoods are particularly effective. Leaves and berries also contribute to garden colour. Euonymus europaeus is stunning in autumn, with striking red leaves and orange and pink fruit, it is perfect in a woodland scheme.
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