Making an impression: an artist's eye for colour

"Throw away the rules and plant what you like!" That's the advice of Sonia Day, an artist and writer who has gardened in Toronto and now paints and gardens in Fergus, Ontario. She plays with colour in the garden the way she plays with colour in her paintings, reminding us that gardening is supposed to be enjoyable. Sonia gets enjoyment from combining pale pink tulips with blue-flowered Jacob's Ladder; mixing Mandarin honeysuckle with the yellow petals of clematis tangutica; and complementing pink bleeding hearts with 'Greenland' tulips.

When Sonia plants what she likes, it becomes an impressionist's pallette. When I plant what I like, it becomes the craziest of crazy quilts -- a hodgepodge of blues, purples, pinks, oranges, magentas, and oh, splashes of yellow here and there. I've had a vague sense that something just wasn't right, but until I heard Sonia speak of colour wheels and analagous, monochromatic, and complementary colour combinations, I hadn't looked at my garden through the eyes of an artist.

Artists think of colours as either warm or cool. Each sets a mood, creates an illusion, and guides the eye, affecting the way in which we react to the scene before us. Red, orange and yellow are warm colours that trick us into thinking they're closer than they are. Knowing this one basic fact has changed my planting plans for the beds at the back of my long, narrow city garden. By massing bright, yellow wood poppies in a shady spot in those distant beds, I can make it seem closer to the flower borders near the house, creating the illusion of a wider, shallower space.

The cooler colours of purple, blue and green do the opposite: they recede into the distance. Planting blues and purples at the back of the garden would make it look even longer and narrower than it is -- doubly so if the colours of the flowers closer to the house were warm yellows, oranges and reds. The cool colours would seem farther away than they are, and the warm ones closer, increasing the distance between them.

Combining colours is an art. In one of Sonia's paintings, earth-toned greens, mustards and ochers warm a wintry canvas in a classic example of an analogous colour scheme. When artists combine colours that are adjacent to each other on the colour wheel, something magical happens - they create harmony. Magenta, violet and blue sing like a barbershop quartet when placed side-by-side in the garden. Outrageous groupings of red, vermillion, and orange rap out a message that some think contentious. For me though, transforming a crazy quilt garden into a choir of colours would take years of practice.

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