Feel good colour

In the second of a three-part series, Carol Klein shares the craft of using colour in the garden – this month she explains how it can help to boost your mood

- Carol Klein

Walking into my friend Sonia’s garden through an old wooden gate, with tall, moss-covered banks either side under towering beech trees, I remember being stopped in my tracks by an all-encompassing wave of tranquillity.

Everything was soft, nothing jarred, the colours of both flowers and foliage seemed to flow one into another. There were no sharp contrasts and, though the setting accounted in part for the mood, it was the harmonious colour that created the sense of complete peace.

Sometimes colour, or more specifically the use of colour, is not considered or is even completely accidental. But when it is used deliberately it can be the most important element in establishing a mood, in making us feel relaxed, excited, energised or galvanised.

Walk into a garden full of cannas, vibrant dahlias, vivid gladioli and there’s no way you’re going to relax. The opposite happens: you feel stimulated, raring to go. We respond to different colours in different ways, but it is the combination of those colours that establishes a mood. Yellow chimes with blue; it is comfortable and easy. But yellow alongside fiery oranges and reds excites.

FEEL ENERGISED

Have you ever walked into a garden on a day when worries seem uppermost in your mind and then, as you wander around, your mood changes and you begin to feel more optimistic, more upbeat?

If the sun is shining all the better, though it may well be the use of colour that lifts your mood. Kaleidoscopic planting schemes, with saturated colour in big drifts and injections of opposite colour, set the whole picture alight.