Shocking Colour Will Make Your Garden Pop

A jolt of crazy colour is an unexpected and inexpensive way to make your garden pop.

CHEAP TRICK | A Vancouver architect friend of mine has a sideline as a garden photographer, and not long ago he grumbled to me that one of the magazines he works for in the U.S. never puts his photographs on their cover. “I take great plant portraits,” he said, “but unless I am willing to include a brightly coloured chair in my shots, not one of them will ever make it.” That’s because art directors know the swiftest way to catch the attention of gardeners cruising the magazine racks is to hit them with a jolt of unexpected colour.

What works on gardening magazine covers works equally well in the garden proper. But if you require proof, check out the Madoo Conser- vancy, the Sagaponack, New York, garden of American artist Robert Dash. While Dash’s planting is excellent (he understands well the visual push and pull of high-contrast foliage), it is his brightly painted architectural elements that stand out and give Madoo its distinct, original character (that and the garden’s various Tudor, High Renaissance, early Greek, and Oriental design influences). Painted elements include a large and airy gazebo in a lovely shade of lavender, acid-yellow doors (one is shown in the photograph here), cornflower blue gates and lime-and-persimmon-coloured gateposts.

Why So Blue?

It’s one thing to paint manmade elements unexpected colours but quite another to go all Alice In Wonderland and paint the landscape itself. As a way to draw attention to global deforestation, Australian sculptor Konstantin Dimopoulos has coloured the trunks and branches of live trees in West Vancouver, Richmond and Port Moody with a biodegradable water-base wash in a cornflower blue colour that will eventually fade away. Talk about arresting the eye. Dimopoulos’s installations are presented by Vancouver Biennale Open Air Museum to coincide with United Nations Year Of The Tree.

Dimopoulos says he picked the colour blue because it’s not identified with trees and that makes his installations and message memorable. In 2003, well-known British photographer and garden designer Andrew Lawson chose a similar colour paint to preserve the remains of a “much-loved tree”  in his own garden. I was shocked the first time I saw it for sure, and there was no way I’ll ever forget the experience.

The best thing about paint is that it’s impermanent,” a designer friend once told me. “It’s easy and cheap to colour a chair or planter a shocking bubble gum pink or incendiary orange [or a live or dead tree vibrant blue], and it’s just as easy to change it again to another, different colour.” —Ron Rule

View images of The Madoo Conservancy at www.madoo.org. See more of Konstantin Dimopoulos’s work at www.kondimopoulos.com

Photos, top to bottom: Blue Trees, Melbourne, 2006, courtesy Konstantin Dimopoulos; courtesy Karl Gercens, www.KarlGercens.com; C. Rule