Foliage and colour

The foliage

The colour and shape of leaves plays an important but often unacknowledged role in a garden, including in a border. Only a proportion of the plants in a border will be in bloom at any point in the growing season. The rest will show only their foliage. It needs to be attractive and makes a large yet unnoticed contribution to the overall impression produced by a garden or border.

Large or small, green, red, grey or blue: the unusual shape and colour of leaves and above all the variation between them can give a very special effect. Foliage generally remains attractive for a large proportion of the year. Flowers are exhausted at some point, and at best will leave some attractive seed pods, colourful fruit or attractive stems behind. Use plants with large leaves in a large garden to make the garden feel more intimate.

It is a good idea - particularly in a smaller garden - to opt for a particular theme in the use of colour: for example, plant with mainly green and yellow flowering plant varieties. You then need to make the overall picture interesting with accents in different shades, such as a blue-flowering specimen here and there. Create substantial groups of the basic choice.

Some ideas:

Tranquility

• One nice combination is to plant large groups of lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis), yarrow (Achillea), day lilies (Hemerocallis) and Helen’s flower (Helenium) beside and partly behind one another so that they appear to be interwoven.
• Place blue accents between them with plants such as catmint (Nepeta), globe thistles (Echinops) and spiderwort (Tradescantia). And make sure that these elements repeat in the planting. That creates an overall sense of tranquillity.
• A combination with grasses with fine shapes also works very well.

Give blue the lead

• You can also opt for blue shades in the lead role
• Blue (and pink) are many people’s favourite
• But the clearer the light, the stronger the colours need to be: at the seaside or in the bright light of the South of France, for example, pastel shades soon disappear
• Blue is a real sun colour and will be largely lost in a shaded border. This is because the colour blue is very close to green, which is certainly predominant in a shaded border.
• Strengthen blue shades with yellow or white accents
• Nature provides some fine examples of this, such as forget-me-nots (Myosotis) with a paler heart to the blue flower with the green of the leaf underneath
• Blue also stands out better with purple – try blue Scilla with lavender (Lavandula)