Pastel Border Designs

Pastel Border Designs are perennial (no pun intended!!) favourites with our clients.

As garden designers we always ask about colour during our discussions with clients.

Very few people don't care about colour. Most people have at least one colour aversion. Perhaps 25% ask for hot colours. But most people ask for pastel border designs.

'Oh you know me' they say self deprecatingly ' pastel colours: white, soft pink, pale blue, and mauve.'

We usually ask to inject some stronger, deeper or brighter colour. Some folks look a little concerned and then we show them pictures of the luscious deep crimson red of David Austin's 'Munstead Wood' Rose  or the inky purple blue of Aconitum 'Spark's Variety' and then they soon see that all will be well.

And truth to tell unless you do add deeper or stronger notes to pastel border designs they can become a tad soporific and saccharine.

Spots or pulses of deeper colour, rich colour let us call it, only add to the scheme, the pastels somehow becoming more pastel!

But in this project our clients, with whom we have worked on other projects in the same Gloucestershire garden, are having their 'colour cake' and eating it.

For one side of the hedge they have the big  hot colourful borders  the generous space suggests.  And then when all this red, orange, yellow and lime becomes too much for them they can dash through the hedge into:

Peaceful pastel nirvana!

If this planting plan is too puzzling for words

then this photo clarifies it.

Part of a large garden, this irregularly shaped area is sandwiched in between two other garden rooms. It has 3 entrances, 2 spaces for seats, 2 types of hedge and a wall for its boundaries. Given the structural diversity it needed a strong concept and a cohesive approach. Working with the clients from the time of our concept design for the entire grounds, a design for this garden room has evolved which focuses on a raised round pond at one end from which water falls into a rill which traverses the entire length of the space. Three small trees are set in three arcs of grass surround the pond. The resulting spaces are five curiously shaped borders, separated by paths.

Even the triangular borders

are different sizes.

But we have tried, bearing in mind the diverse border shapes and surrounds, to retain continuity in planting throughout:

balancing both colour and plant types across the space.

So for the most part each border contains the same plants. Just fewer of each type in the smaller borders obviously.

And also each border is divided into two mirroring halves.

The planting will be pastel with deeper notes of blue and purple and there will 10 rose and clematis clad obelisks as punctuation points.

We will cover this garden design in more detail in due course.

As yet, the garden is just raising its head above the parapet to peak at you!

Planting will take place shortly.

R