What’s not to love about yellow you might think – it’s bright, cheery, striking; there are some gorgeous yellow- flowered and leafed plants; it’s sunshiny disposition is a tonic, managing to uplift us all, especially in spring. But yellow is not without its detractors it seems. The modernists of the 50’s for instance disliked yellow for its intensity, considering it way too jarring to be comfortable; and yellow has been banned from many a ‘snob’s’ garden for simply being considered the colour of ‘the people’.
Controversy and prejudice aside though yellow has a lot going for it in terms of garden design and if you can harness its power effectively the results can be spectacular.
Like red, yellow is both a primary colour and a ‘hot’ one and many of the attributes of red also apply to yellow. For instance both colours draw attention and as such seem to ‘advance’ – useful if you want to make a large space appear smaller. Play around with hues though and yellow becomes much more versatile than red. Paler yellow can act as a soothing balm to other colours for instance – odd for a hot colour; and an all yellow – but different shades – scheme works so much better than an all red planting scheme. The secret to its success is probably in its positioning on the colour wheel. Sitting right next to green – THE predominant neutral colour of any garden – yellow blends with green like no other colour.
But it’s not only green that yellow works well with. Pair it with blues and purples (violet) and it acts as a spectacular foil to its complementary colours; and still further, no hot border will ever be complete without the analogous colours of red, orange and yellow.
Yellow is also one of the best natural reflectors of light in a garden – edge a pathway with yellow foliage or flowered plants and you instantly create a ‘light marker’ along the path. Position yellow in areas that get early or late sunshine and you create golden ‘glows’ around your garden. Pale yellows, like white, seem to glow in a night time garden.
Whilst yellow can seem super fresh and radiant on hot sunny days, summer time is perhaps its least effective season because of its reflective qualities. Depending on the tone of yellow, very bright sunshine can make a bright yellow seem far too dazzling and overpowering whereas the softer light of spring, autumn and winter tends to only bring out the best of yellow.
One of the tricks of using yellow to its best advantage is to mass plant with it rather than dot it around a border. Think how striking fields of sunflowers or rapeseed are when seen en masse and whilst we don’t all have a field available to us we can proportionally mass plant within the space we do have. And one more thing about yellow (flowers) that’s worth mentioning: bees love it (even though they think its blue)… and we love bees… so what’s not to love?
