Home Decorating Ideas - Colour your garden

If you were lucky enough to visit the Chelsea Flower Show in May you may, like me, have felt something was missing. Walking past all those great show gardens designed by some of the best garden designers you'll have wondered where all the colours had gone. In fact there were only a handful of gardens that seemed to overflow with colour whilst the majority concentrated on the singular use of green foliage with the occasional elegant use of white.

This year gardening fashion has gone green in more ways than one.Foliage is the new fashion for 2008 in gardens. From long sweeping hedges and huge clumps of bamboos, to formal topiary and exotic greens in the form of tree ferns and palms. The fashionable garden is understated and concentrates on form and texture. Maybe it's a natural progression from an emphasis on the environment and waterwise planting but I have to say for me it feels a bit cold. A sophisticated green and white scheme can look great in a formal city garden but I'd like a little more oomph in the my planting even if its only a field of blues and cool yellows.

The important thing for us is that we don't have to follow fashion in our own spaces. Indeed, if past trends are anything to go by next year the fashion will be for much brighter sunnier colours. So how can we get ahead and plant next year's fashionable garden?!One of my favourite colour combinations is to use blues, purples, yellows and whites. For a relaxed Mediterranean feel try mixing aromatics like Lavender, Salvia and Rosemary with flowering shrubs like Teucrium, the rock roses Cistus and Helianthemum and a great favourite of mine Perovskia atriplicifolia "Blue Spire". Then mix in some of the Verbascums like Verbascum 'Gainsborough and Anthemis tinctoria "E C Buxton". And for some excellent groundcover try Phlomis russelina, the day lily Hemerocallis and Lysamachia punctata.

For some height in your border try mixing together Verbena bonariensis and Veronicastrum "Apollo". This mix of plants will give you a really long summer of colours from May through to late September and many of these plants look great with frost on their dying leaves in the autumn so you have an excuse not to tidy up until the end of the year!Hotter colours had a brief showing as fashionable plants back in 2007 but if you have a very sunny spot they are a great year in year out solution to fight against the sun and give your garden a wow factor. Once again, Hemerocallis is a good plant for long lasting displays, choose the hot varieties like "Scarlet Orbit", "Golden Chimes" and "Stafford". Crocosmia is another easy hot perennial which requires no maintenance apart from a tidy in the autumn. Many daisy type flowers can provide late summer interest and the best for impact and height must be Rudbeckia fulgida "Goldsturm" other varieties might reach higher but this one is a must for a hot corner. And then there are the Heleniums and another favourite of mine Kniphofia the red hot poker which I persuade very few people to have in their gardens.

I think it's a lot like Dahlias in that we associate these plants with our grandparents and allotments but maybe if we really are all getting allotments again then maybe these great plants will make a comeback. A border full of these colours will certainly bring a smile to your face during the economic gloom!There's over a thousand different varieties of plants in just these few species I've mentioned above so there's no reason why you can't get down to the garden centre of your local nursery and pick out a colour combination that works for you.

Get a trolley and play around with the plants, just remember garden centres tend to stock what's hot that month so if you want a year round splash of colour you'll need to spend a little more time researching winter, autumn and spring colours. You could look at winter Hamamellis in yellows and reds, great autumn colours like the leaves of Hydrangea quercifolia and all those spring bulbs. Whatever you do now will reward with great colours next year and you never know, you might be really fashionable for a season?

Andrew Fisher Tomlin designs and constructs gardens in London and overseas. You can visit his website at www.andrewfishertomlin.co.uk or for a chat about your garden project call him on 020 8542 0683

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