Colour for Adventurous Gardeners

Here, at last, is a book on gardening with colour by its most adventurous exponent -Christopher Lloyd. COLOUR FOR ADVENTUROUS GARDENERS is about using colour for maximum impact.No border, no garden is ever monochromatic and even an all-green garden consists of many shades, yet books for gardeners treat each colour as a separate entity and, like painting by numbers, set out rules to be followed. With a chapter on every colour -from ‘Challenging Orange’ to ‘Sophisticated Black’, Christopher Lloyd explores each colour in relation to others and discusses the rules in order to encourage the gardener to break them. ‘The limitations imposed by rules,’ he writes, ‘are a safe-haven, but the adventurous gardener will want to try something different.’If a colour is ‘polite’, Lloyd certainly knows how to liven it up without making it vulgar. In a fashionable all-white border, he advocates a touch of clear pink to make you sit up; he suggests bright scarlet rose hips in a purple bed to introduce a note of rebellion.COLOUR FOR ADVENTUROUS GARDENERS is NOT another book on gardening with colour. It’s opinionated, it’s controversial and it’s the most colourful book on plant associations you’ll ever read.