Cultivating joy Part 3 Colour

If you want joyful summer beds and borders for years to come then no-fuss planting schemes, combined with feel-good factor palettes, are a great place to start, says Sue Kent

- Sue Kent

A major part of my gardening joy is visual, and as my knowledge and observational powers have improved over decades of gardening, so has my love of experimenting with colour schemes. When I first came to my garden over 35 years ago, I looked at plants individually. I enjoyed the striking blue of the Ceanothus, the soft pink of my Deutzia and when I went shopping for plants, I was drawn to them by their colour. I knew nothing about gardening and this was just a gut reaction - I purchased the plants that caught my eye, not really thinking about how they would work with other plants in the garden.

This all changed when visiting my talented gardening friend in Cornwall and I saw a plant combination of Erigeron and Lobelia that grabbed my attention. I noticed how each plant heightened the colour of the other and my visual enjoyment was greatly increased. This was an epiphany, and the realisation gave me great excitement. I understood I could get better results if I paid more attention to how colours work together, and so began a journey, spending time visiting shows and open gardens at home and abroad to learn more. My garden now includes colourful plants and flowers all year round with continual inspiration to be had from experimenting with both traditional and more avant garde colour schemes.

I love how nature puts colours together and like so many of us, I am visually drawn to the apparent random colours of a wildflower meadow. My first experience of this was in France at The Gardens of Eyrignac Manor, where a jumble of delicate yellow, pink, blue and orange flowers among swathes of lush grass was arrestingly beautiful. I know I can’t recreate that exactly, but will always journey to see such hopeful and uplifting visions be they in France, at Highgrove, or on the Gower Peninsula in South Wales, where I live.