Turn up the colour

TOO many gardeners are afraid of colour; indeed, I confess to feeling guilty on occasion at my profligate use of it in the garden.

- Alan Titchmarsh

We are conditioned, in this sophisticated world of ours, to revere tastefulness, and tastefulness most frequently involves restraint— pastel shades and subtle hues. Orange and yellow, scarlet and magenta are frequently reviled.

Over the past few months, anything that lifts our spirits has become prized; bright flowers fall into that category. How uplifting is a large terracotta pot stuffed with scarlet geraniums? Somehow, white doesn’t quite cut it—not least because white geraniums (by which I mean pelargoniums) don’t age well. Their browning petals disfigure their virgin purity, whereas fading red flowers join the shadows among the scarlet blooms.

My love for pelargoniums goes back to my parks-department apprenticeship, where, with two or three other council gardeners, I would sit around a large sheet of hessian in the stone-floored potting shed each September— piled high with severed stems taken from the plants on roundabouts and traffic islands—and make my contribution to the several thousand geranium cuttings that had to be taken each year to fill the following season’s flowerbeds.