My passion for pink!

Varied, versatile, vivid or understated, pink plants fit into any colour scheme. Carol Klein shares her passion and picks her favourites

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Unless you are a ‘foliagephile’, or insist on displaying nothing but cool blues or sunset tones of red, orange and yellow, you are almost certainly growing one or probably more plants in your garden whose flowers are pink. Why is pink such a popular colour in our plots? For a start, it fits in easily. It is a sociable colour, unless you're straying into its extremes (vivid magenta comes to mind), and it is a flower colour that is easy on the eye and extremely versatile. It is difficult to make it clash - possibly the most grating combinations are between different pinks rather than between pink and other colours.

Nowadays pink is thought of as a feminine colour, girly even. Can you see Barbie in anything but pink? It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that the swing from pink as a boy’s colour to a girl's colour and vice-versa, came about. The pink triangle was originally used as a badge of shame by the Nazis to identify homosexuals and was later adopted by the LGBT+ community as a symbol of pride.

Romance and theatre

In our gardens, pink can take on a plethora of connotations and create different kinds of moods and effects. Used with white it can lend a romantic feel, add crimson and you introduce theatre into the proceedings. Here at Glebe Cottage, one area is called ‘Alice’s Garden’, named for our youngest daughter. Pink, white and crimson are colours she loves (mix crimson and white and you get pink).

Although, as in most gardens, the predominant colour is green, this green foliage is a perfect foil for the pink combinations. Astrantias abound; the bracts of Astrantia major, aka Aunt Hattie’s pincushion or melancholy gentleman, are green and white, but in many selections and cultivars, pink creeps into its colouring.