Everything goes with everything - especially pink!

In the bold and brilliant garden, clashes of colour don't really happen. All the bold and brilliant colours tend to go well with each other.

Discretion is required though in how large to make your clumps of colour. You want to avoid a mimsy-pimsy, traditional-municipal-garden arrangement of having lots of little plants each in a different bold colour.  Instead you want to promote solid blocks of colour.  

In the picture below I have a decent-sized clump of Alstroemeria 'Indian Summer' giving me the hot colours of orange/red/yellow, and below it a contrasting solid line of five bright pink pelargoniums (survivors, pleasingly, from the previous year).  This combination looks great. and will continue to look great into the late autumn.  The surrounding plants tend to echo the arrangement - for instance the foliage plant to the right of the alstroe is Eucomis Comosa 'Sparkling Burgundy' which underlines the alstroe's dark foliage, whereas the yellow evergreen shrub is Euonymus Japonicus 'Extase' which picks out the yellow in the alstroe flowers.


 

So every colour goes with every other colour but I would particularly recommend combinations involving bright pink.  It does have to be bright pink; pale pink won't do at all in a bold and brilliant garden.  Neither do we want mauve-pinks with too much blue in them.  They tend to look cold.  Magenta though is bright enough to be welcome, very much so.  But if we envisage pink as being distinct from magenta then our ideal pink is both bright and warm. 

Christopher Lloyd helped to popularise the controversial combination of yellow and pink.  It is a combination that I love.  Also grand is to combine orange and pink, as I have done in the plant combination above.  A couple of years ago I planted a red monada with a pink diascia personata behind it.  I expected the red-pink combination to look very odd, but in fact it was stunning.  Well, pink is arguably pale red so why should I be surprised?


My garden in 2015 taking combinations with pink to the ultimate.

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