Many studies have linked gardening with personal wellness. Planning, creating and maintaining your garden not only benefits your physical fitness and health, it also improves mental wellness by relieving stress, reducing anxiety and depression, and generally improving your overall quality of life.
A well-planned garden is a haven for the senses, offering a variety of complementary fragrances, textures and colours, which have a demonstrable effect on mood. Advocates of colour therapy believe it can directly affect the energies in your body and contributes to physical, mental, emotional and spiritual healing.
If you don’t give thought to the placement of colour in your garden, it can have unexpected results. Red, for example, draws the eye, and if you place a clutch of red flowers at the far end of your garden it may make the space seem smaller. Conversely, placing cooler colours – such as light blues or white – in the same location helps make your garden seem more spacious.
The colour wheel is an extremely useful tool in your garden as it displays the spectrum in a cycle from red through orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, violet and back to red. This visual prompt shows at a glance that colours are warm and which are cool, which colours are close together in the spectrum and which ‘oppose’ each other on the wheel. You might think that opposite colours on the wheel (such as red and green, or blue and orange) would clash, but in fact opposing colours are often complementary. Try planting complementary colours alongside or amongst each other for an attractive contrast – for instance a blue-purple flower such as Grecian windflower alongside golden yellow marigolds.
You may prefer to keep your garden within a narrow range of similar colours – for example, warm tones of red, orange and yellow, to create a bright and vibrant landscape, or cooler blues and pale indigo to give a more soothing, relaxing environment. Another technique is to use a triad of colours – choose three that are spaced equally apart around the wheel and combine them to create an impactful arrangement. The colour triad is a little trickier to pull off than some other colour combinations, but with just the right blend of colours and shapes this approach can deliver spectacular results such as a claret-coloured rose alongside yellow-orange zinnia and blue morning glories.