Colour all year round

Whether you own an acre of garden or a windowbox, you will probably want to ensure that you have some colour in your garden for all of the year. Colour all year round is easy to achieve inside the house, where painted walls and soft furnishings do not change their appearance with the seasons. Well, they might look a bit grimier than you remember when the sun shines in the spring, but that’s why you have spring cleaning! However, out in the garden a few bare twigs can be a mound of white blossom one minute and a pale green bush the next. You need a bit of planning to get a good result.

Different colours suit different seasons. When I used to sell plants, it was always the yellow polyanthus, which customers chose first in the spring. Vibrant, bright colours look right in March, when we are ready for some light and life after the winter. Bright pinks and blues tend to look rather odd in the middle of winter, when something with more warmth is wanted. Seasonal colour is one part of gaining colour all year round, but, to start, plan your planting around more permanent colour.

Green is a colour, which often goes unnoticed for most of the year. Evergreen plants are easy to live with and add form when the rest of the garden is empty. Evergreens come in different shades and textures, with everything from large, glossy leaves to small, matt leaves. A mix of 1/3 or 2/3rds evergreens to other plants is about the right proportion in a border.

Whilst evergreens give colour for the whole 12 months, foliage plants come in a close second, providing shades of green, red, yellow and purple for 9 months. This is a good long time, so choose them to complement or contrast with the evergreens.

Flowers are often the first things you think of when imagining colour in the garden. Most flowering plants provide a show for 2 – 4 weeks only, so you need a carefully planned succession of different flowers to maintain a colour theme. Even then, plants tend to flower earlier or later than they should, spoiling your plan. So it is important to get the foliage background right to start with, so you have something to fall back on.

Plants with coloured bark are a good source of colour in the winter. They seem to have had their Ready-brek , when the stems glow with inner warmth in winter sunshine. Dogwoods and willows are nothing special in leaf, but worth having when the leaves drop.

Non-plant sources are an easy way of adding more permanent colour with no gardening involved. Glazed pots and painted furniture can carry your interior colour scheme outside. Fences can be painted in restful or vibrant shades, depending on the mood you want to create, and paving comes in many different colours. All of these can be used to reinforce your general colour theme, before a single bloom emerges.

At last the days are getting longer and you can see the garden when you get home from work. Unfortunately, the plant breeders have not yet produced a plant which flowers profusely for 12 months of the year, in a variety of colours to prevent boredom, and always looks full of health, neat and tidy. However, by choosing a variety of plants, you can still have colour in the garden all year round.