Color and Garden Design
by Jan Little

ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED: 1999 Spring

Color in a garden is an elusive quality. Our perception of color changes from year to year; from season to season; morning to evening. How we see color changes from sunlight to shade and between close and distant views. Each of us also sees color uniquely. All of those challenges make the use of color in landscape design both difficult and rewarding.

In designing the landscape, the gardener makes a series of thoughtful choices. How do areas relate? Which areas should connect functionally? Which materials will best meet your design goals? Each stage of the process refines the thoughts and solutions from the previous stage.

Within that design framework, color is used in two distinct ways. At a broad scale, color is one of the final screens used to sift through your possible material selections. Color is used to reinforce the thoughtful design choices made earlier. You may choose a punctuation of dark green to draw the eye, or install an even field of green to provide a backdrop. In this broad scale, the final plant choice is a combination of functional requirements for size, density, texture, the site's horticultural limitations, and finally, color choice.

In contrast, at a smaller scale in garden design, color takes a seat closer to the front of the decision bus. In the flower bed or garden border, color combinations become far more of the goal. Functional and horticultural requirements now act as the final sieve for color choices. So, for example, in a lightly shaded garden you may be looking for a specimen perennial plant to anchor the bed. You will want to consider all bright value flowers that will prosper in shade. The selection might include creamy goatsbeard (Aruncus dioscus), astilbe selections, white fairy wands (Cimicifuga racemosa), lavender meadowrue (Thalictrum rochebrunianum), lime hosta ÔSum & Substance' or yellow celadine poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum). In each case these plants have some extreme feature to consider: for most it is height, but for the hosta and the celadine poppy it is coarse texture. Which to choose? In winnowing your selection, the celadine poppy is tossed out of the running because it is so invasive, the fairy wands because they bloom later than you want, the astilbes because they will be relegated to a supporting role and the meadowrue because it is too fine in texture for this particular site. You settle on using both the goatsbeard and the hosta ÔSum & Substance' as anchor plants since they combine well, offer different seasons of interest and have different attributes that work well together. These two key choices are the springboard for choosing the rest of the garden's plants.

Both types of color choices, large and small scale, deserve your attention. But learning about the use of color in garden design can be frustrating. Most books and articles give you a good, basic vocabulary of color systems, color wheels and mixing paint to create colors, and that generally ends the discussion of color in favor of listing plants by color.

Color can be created by mixing light or by mixing pigments, as in paint. In both of those applications you work with the traditional primary colors, red, blue and yellow and their various combinations that create the secondary and tertiary colors. In the garden, plants are used for their color effects. We don't create their colors, we use them, place them and manipulate their environment. So, in the garden, it is more important to talk about how the human eye perceives color. Humans perceive four colors as unique: red, green, blue and yellow. To our eye these colors do not appear to be mixtures of other colors, as orange, for example, appears to be a mixture of red and yellow. This is important news for the gardener because it adds the color green as a unique--human--primary color. The other important color vocabulary words include hue, contrast, value, saturation, warm, and cool. On pages 6-7 is a chart I have devised to define and understand these terms.

Color as a Design Tool

Let us assume that the landscape's framework and form are in place, and that you have a full understanding of what each garden element is supposed to accomplish. It should then be a simple matter to make some broad decisions about color. To know what should be dark and what should be light, imagine the design as a black and white photograph or as it will appear in winter. The painter Monet used color in his gardens first by creating black and white studies of the desired landscape. Studying darkness and light, shadow and sunlight, focusing on where the eye would go and where it would pause. Only when Monet understood those broad-scale issues, and how color would reinforce them, did he move on to his smaller-scale color choices.

Do you want certain areas or elements to be distinct? Do you want to frame an entryway, or draw attention to an object that accents a view? Is it a contrast in value you seek? Is it a change in hue? Or is it dependent on color saturation?

For example, if you want visitors to move through an area, emphasize a sense of "hallway" by limiting the amount of color contrast, such as when an allee is created with two long rows of a single plant. If you want your visitors to pause at a gateway or entry, make them do so by creating a sudden contrast in color or in value. The dark green of conifers placed on either side as you exit from a woodland garden will signal the visitor that this is a doorway to changing views.

You can ease transitions from sunlight to shade, for example, by using a color very high in value (light yellow flowers, chartreuse leaves, white or silver foliage or flowers) as the visitor crosses into shade. Your eyes take a bit of time to re-adjust to dim light. Using a high value color at that transition will make the adjustment easier. So that lime-green hosta ÔSum and Substance' will serve well as an entry plant in the shade garden.

Another issue that requires close attention in choosing colors for a landscape is the site itself. Your perceptions of the site will change over the course of the day, from season to season, and over the course of years. Once again, the gardener will find that the use of color on a site has two scales: first, the overall site layout in which color is an underpinning tool and second, the flower border in which color is the primary concern.

Your analysis of the site will change the manner in which you combine design goals with site conditions. For example, from which direction does the light come from at various times of the day? At what time of day or season do you want the garden to look its best? Is there a single point of view or entry that is more important than others? Will people simply view the garden or will they move through it as well? How close a view will they have of the individual plants? Do you want the user to feel entertained, intrigued, or calmed?

The direction of light will affect your perceptions of a landscape. If the light is coming from behind the garden the shadows will cast forward, creating an increasingly dim light towards the front of the bed. Don't lose the front portion of your bed with cool, receding colors, a low level of contrast, or dark values. Build contrast and visual depth by using fully saturated colors in the foreground with a high value. Imagine, if you will, a backlit flower bed with shrub roses, ornamental grasses, Russian sage and peachleaf bellflower forming the back and middle range of the bed. At the front of the border is an edging of annual deep blue lobelia. Unfortunately, the lobelia will disappear as soon as you are ten feet away from the bed. Instead, substitute Coreopsis verticillata ÔZagreb' (it is a warmer color) for the lobelia, and suddenly you have re-claimed the front of the bed by using a flower that is warm, high in value and high in hue (color) contrast to the blue and red of the other flowers.

On the other hand, light coming from the side will emphasize the shapes of plants, since your eye picks up the light's shadow effect. Some plants act as light "sifters": the seedheads of ornamental grasses practically glow when low morning or warm evening light sifts through them. Remember also that low value and cool colors will disappear in the shadows. Front lighting can foreshorten a plant bed, because as the shadows cast backward the plants become invisible to the viewer.

Morning light, particularly in the summer, looks the clearest because it is moving through less particulate matter in the atmosphere. Summer light is also the highest overhead, creating crisp shadows and a clarity that allows us to enjoy all colors, although it can be bright enough at midday to dull even saturated colors. What was described to you as a clear pink rose will often look washed out in the midday summer sun: plan for that by picking a rose of a more saturated hue.

In contrast, evening light assumes a warmer glow because it is moving through a more "dusty" atmosphere, which adds a rich glow to the light and everything it touches.

Light not only changes in quality over the course of the day but also changes effect from season to season, in direction and clarity. In autumn the light is lower in the sky and it also passes through more atmospheric particles, creating a warmer light. Because it is lower it appears to skim through plants, which is why ornamental grasses look superb in the fall. Because the colors in nature at that time pick up a warm cast, cool shades such as the greenish-yellow of Coreopsis verticillata ÔMoonbeam' would look out of place. They are replaced by the warmer shades of golden yellow leaves, rich golden mums, and warm red-purple asters.

The sun in winter is at its lowest and is muted by the atmosphere it passes through; hence, value contrasts, as seen in a black and white photograph, are key in this season. Silhouette beomes important in the winter--a winged burning bush [Euonymus alata] loaded with snow along its branches creates a striking image. Don't diminish that contrast in value by backing it with something low in value and dark, such as a yew grouping. Emphasize the value contrast between dark branches and bright snow by backing it with a middle range value, such as that created by the mid-range green of ÔWintergreen' boxwood.

Finally in spring, the sun is following the path of returning to its high summertime zenith. The light is transitioning: moving from a "thin" winter light and gaining clarity as it becomes intense summer light. The colors in nature intensify over the course of the season as well, the saturated colors of summer would look strange to us in early spring, particularly here in the midwest. The shocking lavender-magenta of the ÔPJM' rhododendron is disliked by many midwesterners because they identify it as being out of place in our low-contrast springs. On the other hand, the white snowdrop and the pale vernal witchazel fit our springtime season very well.

To write about the use of color in the landscape is almost to make it seem more complicated than it really should be. In the end, the choice of colors is no more complicated than completing a landscape design; in each case the gardener is working from a general set of goals through a prioritized series of steps leading to specific solutions for even the tiniest of areas. And, as in life, you can't control everything. Once in a while, you'll see a color combination that you dislike. Other times, as the light moves through the tree limbs and falls on a bit of your garden, the colors will gleam, and, for the moment, take your breath away.

Jan Little is a landscape architect who is also Manager of Horticulture Education at The Morton Arboretum. You may reach her at (630) 719-2459 or e-mail at jlittle@mortonarb.org.

Bibliography
[compiled by Jan Little and Rommy Lopat]

Color in Garden Design
by Sandra Austin, Taunton Press, 1998, ISBN 1-56158-187-9.

A Garden of One's Own
by Elsa Bakalar, William Morrow & Co. 1994, ISBN 0-688-12145-4.

Year Round Garden: Colour in Your Garden from January to December
by Adrian Bloom, Timber Press, 1998, ISBN 0-88192-457-1

The Foliage Garden: Tapestries of Color, Shape, and Texture
by Becke Davis, Friedman/Fairfax Publishers, 1998, ISBN 1-56799-696-5

Impressionistic Garden
by Derek Fell, Crown Publishers, 1994, 0-517-59851-5.

Color Echoes
by Pamela Harper, MacMillan, 1994. ISBN 0-025-48185-1.

Color Garden
by Malcolm Hillier, a Dorling Kindersley Book, 1995, ISBN 0-7894-0158-4.

Color in Your Garden
by Penelope Hobhouse, Little, Brown and Co, 1991, ISBN 0-316-36748-6.

The Gardener's Book of Color
by Andrew Lawson, Reader's Digest Books, 1996, ISBN 0-89577-858-0

Light, the Shape of Space: Designing with Space and Light
by Lou Michel, John Wiley & Sons, 1996, ISBN 0-471-28618-4.

The Essential Earthman
by Henry Mitchell, Indiana University Press, 1981, ISBN 0-253-17436-8

Color by Design
by Nori and Sandra Pope, SOMA, 1998, ISBN 1-57959-016-0

Caillebotte and His Garden at Yerres
by Pierre Witmer, Harry Abrams, Inc., 1990, ISBN 0-8109-3167-2

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