Colour Wheel

As mentioned, while we were at RHS Tatton Park, we rather like the show garden 'A Taste of Ness', which was designed with a long bed encircling decking and pond. The long bed worked from whites, into yellows and on through the spectrum, ending in blues at the other end.

'A Taste of Ness' at RHS Tatton Park (© Ian 2012)

The decking, pond and beanbags weren't particularly what caught our eyes, but the colour scheme. We'd been wondering how to arrange the colours of the garden, and decided this would work with the wheel beds we'd planned:

The seating corner, with putative beds marked out (© Ian 2012)

I had a spare few minutes, and have come up with the following. The idea is that each bed will be white at the arbour end, and then move through pastel colours with deepening colour, before being intense colours at the opposite ends to the arbour.

Colour wheel plan for the seating area (© Ian 2012).

Running through, we'll use a few key plants to tie things together. The grasses from Tatton Park will feature: deschampsias, molinia, panicum and stipa. They can go in almost all the beds (mostly the yellow, orange, and red sections): we've got seeds for a glaucous, blue grass (Leymus arenarius), and we've two variegated grasses for the green bed (the reed grass from Tatton, and the one we pinched from Molly. Heucheras will go everywhere but the blue beds, I reckon; the eryngium obviously belongs near the top of the blue bed. We've bought a number of sweet peas, which will give us wigwams of colour in many of the spots. Once that backbone is there, we'll go to work filling the gaps, safe in the knowledge that any colour has a pre-defined spot!