During the 18th century, a number of thinkers suggested that the human mind is passive, that the mind merely receives impulses and directions from the surrounding environment. This was explored in garden design. The idea was that a tomb in a grove of evergreens would induce melancholy, rugged rocks would inspire feelings of sublime awe, imitations of rustic cottages would arouse feelings of sympathy and charity for the laborers who usually lived in such cottages, flowers gardens would cause feelings of delight.
Flower gardens do cause feelings of delight, but the other experiments were less than totally successful. The human mind is not passive, not even when trained to be passive by a childhood of watching television, but it is possible for gardens to induce moods in visitors.
When attempting to unify a garden through mood, the safest method is for the garden to have only one dominant mood. The garden can be an exuberant explosion of color, a refined garden of pink and lavender or a cool garden in shades of green. This is known as harmony, when everything in the garden supports one mood, even if the mood is not one that most people think of as harmonious. Unity is similar to harmony, because in order to have a unified garden, most of the elements in the garden should harmonize with each other, but unity can also include contrast. Too much contrast will destroy unity, but a garden without contrast will probably be dull. If you orchestrate the garden's moods, it is possible for a unified garden to have more than one mood.
Colors affect moods in humans. The color wheel is divided in half. One half of the wheel is cool, the other is warm. the cool colors, such as blue and green, have a calming, even depressing effect. The warm colors, such as red and orange, have a stimulating effect. Some gardeners place their "hot " border on one side of a path, and their "cool" border opposite the "hot" border. While this may make sense from a colorist's point of view, if you want to orchestrate moods in your garden's visitors, it is probably best to have the visitors move from a "hot" garden to a "cool" garden, or vice-versa.
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