Using color in your garden is a great way to evoke emotion, visually cool or warm your garden and create depth.  We talked about using warm colors in the garden such as red, orange and yellow and shades in between in a recent post “Garden Design: Warm Colors”.

Today we will talk about what cool colors are and how you can use them in your garden.

Blue, purple, pink, white and shades in between are what are known as ‘cool’ colors.

These colors are visually ‘cooling’ to the eye and can evoke emotions of calm and serenity.  Cool colors are often used in gardens in climates with hot weather, which can make you feel ‘cooler’.

Using cool-colored plants in your garden will make your garden appear larger.  This is because cool colors appear farther away then warm-colors to the eye.

Cool-colored plants aren’t limited to flowering plants.  By using trees, shrubs, groundcovers and even succulents with gray foliage creates the same effect.

In design, cool-colored plants are often used in the background, which creates depth and makes your garden appear larger while warm-colored plants are used in the foreground.

Gardens that use cool-colored plants alone are not only beautiful, but evoke a feeling of calm.  Like warm-colored plants, you can plant large groupings of the same colored plant or combine varying shades of blues, purples, pinks and even white.

What are your favorite cool-colored plants?  For those of us who are planning our garden, we would love to hear about them

Be sure to come back to learn how to use both warm and cool-colored plants together in the same garden.

 

Tagged as: Flower Gardening, Gardening Projects, Trees and Shrubs