Garden designer says color more critical than we previously thought

Web posted May 28, 1999

By Adrian Higgins
The Washington Post

For a century at least, gardeners have tried to achieve the perfect marriage of colors in the garden. Sandra Austin thinks she knows why they keep going wrong.

They have been relying on incomplete and erroneous assumptions about color. The art of blending floral hues, it turns out, is much more of a science.

It is a complex science too. As the garden reaches its peak bloom, it seems appropriate to consider Ms. Austin's book, Color in Garden Design (Taunton, $34.95). In writing it, she spent three years studying color, light and optical effects and their bearing on garden design.

Ms. Austin, who lives in Burke, Va., is a former design instructor at George Washington University. Among her basic arguments:

The primary colors we learned at school should not have been red, blue and yellow but magenta, cyan (a greenish blue) and yellow. These are the primary colors that are used in printing and for computer and TV images.

A color or hue is but one-third of a color's attributes. The others are its brightness, or value, and its color richness, or saturation. A color low in saturation looks washed out and gray.

Offering examples of how these variables come together, Ms. Austin notes that brick is either a red or an orange that has low saturation and medium value; the browns of mulch are actually orange with low saturation and low value; and the gray foliage of a plant such as artemisia is really green that is low in saturation but high in value.

With that in mind, it is easy to produce more effective complementary or harmonious color associations, Ms. Austin argues.

``Muted colors have low saturation and medium value; that is, they are more gray than other colors,'' she writes. ``Muted colors are useful in the garden as a contrast to brightly hued flowers or foliage, and they can also be used on their own. Gardens that are transitional between more-striking gardens or gardens that have strongly colored accent or building features can use muted colors as a bridge.''

Natural light combines to enhance and brighten colors. But in printing, colors darken and lose saturation as inks are blended. The human eye sees both of these phenomena in the garden, producing such effects as a flower rich in color when seen close up but grayer when seen from a distance.

``That's critical in design,'' said Ms. Austin. ``Unless you design your garden to get up close, to see, people are going to see a (distant) grayed composition.''

Light in the garden is relative and is altered by time of day, time of year, the placement of surrounding objects (a white wall or green hedge, for example) and whether an object is viewed in sun or shade. Light from the sun is white, but the Earth's atmosphere causes the light to break, making the sky blue and sunlight yellow. Hence, the top of a leaf will look yellow, the bottom blue.

Ms. Austin, in an interview, concedes that the issue is complex but no more, she argues, than other aspects of gardening: botanical names or pH requirements. But color ``is so different, and we not only have to learn about color but unlearn all your old prejudices.''

If this is a crusade, its most effective weapon may be the computer. Ms. Austin sees a designer being able to select two distinct colors and the computer producing a complete palette to match the colors of leaves, bark, mulch, paving, garden furniture, house trim and the rest.

``The computer is going to make the systematic part of it easier, and it's not going to be as frightening for young graphic artists,'' she said.

Ms. Austin, meanwhile, is at work on another book showing you ``how to do all this stuff.''