When you start gardening, you tend to throw plants into the ground without a lot of thought to how that one plant relates to the entire garden. But as you rack up some experience, it's worth considering the "color story" of your garden.
There are four components of garden design to think about: texture, height, seasonality, and color. Most gardeners are guilty (including me) of not thinking about color enough, resulting in what I call the “confetti effect.” This is what happens when you’ve got plants with all kinds of different-colored flowers all over the place, without any real order.
It takes a long time to figure out how to plan for color, particularly when you consider how much your yard changes over the seasons. What's in bloom in May won’t be in November, and you need to plan for both. Here are some ways that I’ve discovered my color story, how I keep working towards it, and how I maintain it.
You already know your taste—what colors draw you in, what appeals to you and what doesn't. And there are flowers and plants for every taste. There are tons of black flowers and plants, as well as white ones, if that’s your style. If you love the whole rainbow, you can plan accordingly. For me, it’s hot colors: I stay within a palette of red, orange, yellow, hot pink and purple.
If you’re looking for color inspiration for your garden, I highly recommend Malcolm Hillier's Color Garden. He covers color palettes by season, and shows how to create powerful tableaus using color blocks of flowers and plants.
I also use color-palette generation tools. Sites like Coolors and ColorMind will suggest palettes, or fill in colors to round out a palette if there is one you want to work with. They can also generate palettes from pictures. These can be incredibly helpful to understand, for instance, complementary colors and how they’ll look against each other.
Unless you specifically avoid these colors, you’re going to end up with a lot of white and ballet pink in your yard. The answer is to stop planting white and pink flowered plants, but also remove and replace them in your yard. Swap a white peony for a red one. Have white foxgloves growing? Don’t just prune them, remove them. Same for white yarrow. All those pink snapdragons and sweet peas? Trade them out for more dramatic colors.
A long band of color, even if it’s within the same color family, can be a powerful design element. A long line of tulips that all fall in the purple/red/magenta families, for instance, can create a shape in your yard almost like an actual wall. Hilier’s book is fantastic for exploring masses of color, whether they're analogous or complementary, against each other. One of my favorite examples is a long band of cornflower blue bluebells against a field of bright orange California poppy. It’s a fleeting effect—neither flower will last more than a month or so— but the contrast of them together is so powerful. (Seriously, buy the book).
If you love white and pink, they can work beautifully, but they should be deliberate choices.
Step one is to commit to the colors you want: Document what colors compel you and which do not, and where you want to place them. This is your guide. Remember, you can have different stories for different areas of the yard and for different times of year—but to start, keep it simple. I am unwilling to give up my stargazer lilies, even if I don’t love light pink, so I contain them to an area, and instead, I have committed to go in hard on a mass of stargazers and have the color bands I use everywhere else extend just enough to include that ballet pink.
Now take the sketch of your yard and start by season. Start with spring—you can easily add color to the garden by using spring-blooming bulbs like tulips. Imagine your fields of color and fill in your sketch using colored pencils to help you visualize. Now you know what to shop for—you’re looking for plants within those color ranges to fill the space. I work to extend that by also considering early-, mid- and late-blooming bulbs, so I know I can have those colors extend across spring.
I document my garden every week or so with video and photos so I can look back and see where plants bloomed or how certain areas looked at any particular time. This is especially useful off-season; once flowers die back, it's difficult to remember where they were. I use my photos to know what to order to backfill later on.
It also helps me understand the color story I’m sticking to, so as I order new plants, I know where I can carve in space, whether for one plant or an entire installation. My friend recently sent me a whole collection of mum clippings from HeritageMums.com and I knew I wanted to create another ombré area, so I arranged them in color order and then carved out the edge of a bed for them, so they’ll all bloom at the same time and tell a story.
You’ll be working on this project for years, because your garden changes. Start with spring, and bulbs. From there, you can look at winter, when things are stark, and begin adding in evergreen shrubs and vines that tell their own story. Fall is next—ensure you have enough late-blooming perennials like asters. You will slowly build up a garden that is color hardy, and has moments everywhere of color.
