Andrew Wilson - Contemporary Color in the Landscape: Top Designers, Inspiring Ideas New Combinations

CONTEMPORARY COLOR IN THE LANDSCAPE

TOP DESIGNERS

INSPIRING IDEAS

NEW COMBINATIONS

ANDREW WILSON

Page 1: The wide spreading leaves of Gunnera manicata are tall enough to stand beneath. Sunlight shining through the umbrellalike leaves creates astonishing effects. Frontispiece: The tawny-gold threads of Stipa tenuissima interwoven with the neon blue flowers and stems of Eryngium planum Blaukappe offer a vivid complementary color contrast. This page: Early morning light captures the caterpillarlike heads of Pennisetum alopecuroides, which are seen through the dark, linear stems and diffuse flower heads of Molinia Transparent.

Copyright 2011 by Andrew Wilson. All rights reserved.

Photographs copyright 2011 Tom Belshaw, Roger Benjamin, Jonathan Buckley, Torie Chugg, Rebecca Cornell, Liz Eddison, Michelle Garrett, Derek Harris, Jacqui Hurst, Andrew Lawson, Steve Martino, Marie OHara, Gary Rogers, Jane Sebire, Lisa Shalet, Derek St Romaine, Nicola Stocken Tomkins, Neil Sutherland, Kim Taylor, Mark Taylor, Andrew Wilson, Steven Wooster

Photo credits appear on page 279.

Published in 2011 by Timber Press, Inc.

The Haseltine Building 2 The Quadrant
133 S.W. Second Avenue, Suite 450 135 Salusbury Road
Portland, Oregon 97204-3527 London nw6 6rj
www.timberpress.com www.timberpress.co.uk

Text designed by Susan Applegate
Printed in China

Text designed by Susan Applegate
Printed in China
Wilson, Andrew, 1959
Contemporary color in the landscape: top designers,
inspiring ideas, new combinations/Andrew Wilson.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-88192-996-6
1. Color in gardening. 2. GardensDesign. I. Title.
SB454.3.c64w565 2011
712.2dc22 2010050776

A catalog record for this book is also available
from the British Library.

Introducing Color
How color affects us. Color in garden
planning.

CHAPTER ONE
Color Is Sensation
How we perceive color. How light affects
color. Theories about color.

CHAPTER TWO
What Colors Mean to Us
How we respond to color. Personality and color choices.

CHAPTER THREE
Designing with Color
How colors interact. Manipulating color.

CHAPTER FOUR
The Drama of Contrast
Igniting opposites. Energy and excitement
in color composition.

CHAPTER FIVE
Creating Intensity
Emotive color. Color saturation and depth
of tone. Color harmonies.

CHAPTER SIX
The Restricted Palette
Maximizing impact by minimizing color.
Color themes in soft and hard materials.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Breaking Color Rules
Personalized color. Unusual color
combinations. Color in new materials.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Inspired by Nature
Reflection and resonance. Color as
the common thread.

Early spring snowdrops herald the new season of planting color, the glowing carpet concealing the bleak detritus of winter. Under a cold blue sky, reflected light recreates the excitement and playfulness of winter snow, before the summer woodland canopy envelopes the green bank with shadows.

As I write, the fresh face of an English spring is emerging in the garden and surrounding landscape. The gaunt grays and chill taupes of winter are being replaced with a hazy mist of promised foliage that will gradually intensify into full green bloom. This cycle of seasonal change is familiar to many, bringing with it a change of mood: as light levels increase, so color intensifies; the earth awakens and we respond.

While winter has its own severe beauty, few can resist the glorious eruption that follows in spring. The freshness of leaf growth and the race into flower are sometimes overpowering but always intoxicating. Summer brings its own heady color mixes, expressive of the seasons heat, before the glowing ochre tones of autumn return the natural palette to the neutrals of winter. Color, when we pause to consider, is an essential part of this cycle, a phenomenon that we often take for granted but one that we can participate in.

In the natural landscape, color simply exists, without artificeblue sky, brown earth, green leaves, white clouds. In our interaction with the natural elements, we can manipulate and control these colors, sometimes to their detriment as we hybridize and engineer, distort and pollute the purity of what is. But we can also come up with happy accidents, beneficial interactions with nature that enhance and amaze almost as effectively as nature itself.

Agriculture can be one such interaction, in which vast expanses of the earths surface are transformed by cropping: the bubbling yellow of rapeseed, the pale ochre of ripening wheat, the chiaroscuro of a freshly ploughed field, or the riotous crowd scene of a meadow in full flower. These are momentary phenomena, for none remains a static color; the ploughed field greens with productivity, the wheat field is harvested to stubble, the yellow flowers seed to green, and the meadow browns and explodes in tones of golden straw. Yet in our minds they are etched as permanent memories and can be resuscitated in our fluttering daydreams.

In architecture, stone is dressed or polished to enhance or change its hidden persona, glass is etched or sand blasted to reveal its magical luminescence, or timber is allowed to weather and silver unless caught within a varnish or a stain. This transformation of materials and their inherent colors is also a fundamental part of contemporary garden and landscape design, tempered and softened by planting.

The art of garden and landscape design exploits these attributes as the essential contrast that lies at the heart of the garden. The power of manipulation of textures and colors is rarely surpassed in any other form of art or design, perhaps because this particular theater is alfresco, lit by nature itself.

Over the past decade, our gardens have positively exploded with color, dominated for too long perhaps by the rather staid and polite tones of the English flower garden. The focus of this change has been the move from shrub-dominated planting to perennials, the result of the New Perennial movement in Europe and subsequently the work of garden designers such as Piet Oudolf. As a great plantsman and designer, he has shown with verve that the gray skies and white light of our temperate zones cant dampen strong color. His borders and plant associations sizzle and sear with the best that the Mediterranean and subtropical climates can offer, influencing a whole generation of garden designers around the world.