I tried a white bed this year. It didn't come out as I had hoped. So I made it a shrub border instead. It's better that way. This coming season, I have a color scheme planned for a few areas. I've got a pink/purple and white bed planned. The anchor is a pink crape myrtle. Cosmos, echinacea, and Russian Sage are some things I'll plant there. It'll be offset on the other side of the path by hot colors in dark purple, orange, burgundy, red, yellow.

In other areas, I mix colors and plants. I like thinking more of texture and space rather than color. When you fill a space, the colors tend to work themselves out, at least for me.

That said, things rarely go as planned. One area of my perennial bed was supposed to be a pink/orange bed. Instead, I bought mislabeled plants, had reseeding rudbeckia, open pollinated traded seeds, and finally just gave up on trying to make it anything other than a catchall area. It turned out nice enough.

Unless you're really careful, you never know what you're going to get if you purchase plants that aren't in bloom. And seeds can sometimes grow into things you never expected.

I limit my colors to pinks, whites, blues purples and yellows. I just love these colors. I avoid reds ( 1 red rose bush, called black magic i love) and orange . I just dont care for them , they are great in other peoples gardens tho! Thats my garden philosophy, if i like it, it goes in my cottage garden!
I think whats important is that you love your garden space, and it makes you proud. Mine does!

My favorites are the cooler colors, pinks, blues, purple and mauve with splashes of white. Lately I'm finding I like creamy yellows and dark foliaged plants and have fallen in love with some of the new echinaceas so we have to add some of the warmer shades to my like list. Never been a fan of orange but like echinacea Tiki Torch, used to think I hated yellow but that can't be true as I seem to have yellow tucked in here and there throughout the garden. Deep velvety reds are nice too so I guess any color is welcome in my garden as long as it's pleasing to the eye.

Annette

In a cottage garden, I like purple, lavender, blue, soft pink, medium pink, white and sometimes a clear yellow. Very similar to spring colors (except maybe for red tulips). I think I pick most of the colors that will look good with the old-fashioned roses, which are mainly pinks and white. I do like gallicas, which are much darker, almost purple, so those fit in with the other colors, too.

However, in the vegetable garden, I like bright yellow, gold, orange, red, hot pink, reddish purple, all the really warm colors. Sunflower, marigold, nasturtium and zinnia colors. They look so good with all the green and are so cheerful :)

I think it's what you like. Start with three colors and see where you go from there. I really am a fussy one for specific blues beside specific purples - I don't like that much. I like blue OR I like purple, but not both (unless it's purple and turquoise, and I can't find a turquoise flower hardy for my garden :)

Red White Blue scheme did not work well for me because I can't get enough blooming all season long here. However, I have pink orange and purple in various places and I love it. During the spring and summer it is very bright, and in the fall it goes much paler.
Some places I have red, orange and yellows.
Others limegreen and purple (foliage and flowers) with some bright yellow mixed in ...

In the veggie garden this year I did lime green and red, and it was really beautiful - just zinnias mixed with the veggies (and really done for a cutting flower for my living room).

For me, anything goes as long as it isn't clashing with something nearby. It's also very much a matter of balance. Last year, one of my borders got too "yellow-heavy" at one end, so I tried to incorporate yellow elsewhere to balance it out. There are certain color combinations that I love, like purple with orange. That said, I normally shy away from bright or orange-y red. I think a cottage garden should definitely lean toward the cool side. When I see a garden that is primarily red, orange, yellow and white, it doesn't look cottage-y to me. Pinks, blues and purples are necessary to my eye.

Although there are colors that I truly love, I subscribe to the idea that mother nature is the consummate cottage gardener and she doesn't seem to discriminate on what colors are mixed together in the wild. I partially use that as my guide but do tend to gravitate towards more purples, oranges, and various shades of green.

If you are a planner, pick those colors that appeal to you and you can't go wrong as long as you vary the growing form/shape/effect in the plants you do chose.

I tend to use only cool colours: mauve, lavender, blue, pink, purple, violet, plum, burgundy, magenta and white along with green, silver, purple and chartreuse foliage. I seem to avoid any warm colours (with the exception of chartreuse), I never tolerated any yellows, reds or oranges in my garden.

I'll be different, I guess. I think in terms of foliage. As I live in coastal No. CA., people are looking at your garden 365 days/yr. We're as likely to be outside in December and January as in July and August - in fact, more likely since even here who wants to garden in hot weather, LOL?

To me foliage is at least 75% of the garden. Because there is a fair amount of shade on my site, and the sunny beds get harsh west-afternoon sun in summer, it can be tricky to site plants correctly. Since this is my first garden, I've done a lot of 'plant dominoes' to get things growing in the right places for the overall cottage-y effect I want.

First off, we painted the house a specific color to contrast but complement the two houses on either side (houses are close together here in the city). Fortunately that was a neutral so any flower color looks good with it, although warmer colors show up more vividly than cool ones. I love blues, but they wash out in our bright sunny days and just don't 'pop' out at you.

Perhaps because out here it's either drab/foggy or bright/sunny, I tend to do a lot of contrast - not just color, but textures.

I'm big on variegated foliage, especially in shadier areas where it adds enormous interest. I contrast height, texture, color, leaf shape - and last, flower color. I want a broad canvas to keep the eye moving, because our lot is a lot of small rectangular beds chopped up by concrete.

By keeping the eye moving around, it minimizes the vast amount of concrete surrounding everything, as well as giving visual relief (making the eye go up and down as different shrubs catch your attention) against those hard flat gray horizontals.

Very few shrubs are truly everblooming. Pink cestrum is, but yellow cestrum isn't, for example. Trailing lantana is almost always everblooming, but will occasionally take a rest. Roses are actually evergreen perennials that only need pruning for appearance's sake, but they'll only bloom 3-4x a year.

My beds are too small for the classic 'plant in threes' mantra. I use foliage for visual interest as well as expanding the scope of 'plant in threes'. For example, in one front yard bed I have three silver-white plants separated by different green-leafed plants: an artemisia 'Powis Castle', a senecio Dusty Miller, and a gray santolina. They complement one another without being identical.

Flowers in my garden come and go. The flushes of color can be car-stopping in the spring, when vivid orange poppies and bright red nasturtiums appear. Then they fade, and cooler purples of lavatera and leptospermum come out. Those end, and the blue-violet of agapanthus and pink-and-white glads, along with pinkish-cream shrub lantana, take over.

I find this type of planting works well for me. This way it doesn't matter when I go out into the garden; there is always something interesting to look at, even if it's just foliage with only a few flowers.

For example, my clivia survive but don't always bloom, when kept short of water (we're in a 3-yr drought). But their leaves look so cool against the variegated rhamnus, whose colorful red-yellow blooms, although tiny, add a nice little bling when you look closely. And the fancy-leaf pelargonium "Vancouver Bicentennial" is pretty whether in or out of flower, but especially contrasted with the tiny white-edged rhamnus leaves:
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No such thing as a color scheme here, for the simple reason that I can't stick to it! I really like the look of them, especially pastel themes and the cool kind like kiskin uses. But I like plants more than I wan't coordination. So in the end, if I see a plant I want to try out, it is going to be planted no matter what the color!

I do try to balance color (usualy done after the fact, lol) out in the garden, as lisa does. If one spot has too much of one color I try to take some out or put more in another spot. I am sometimes a bit obsessed with things being even.
CMK

Some plants are classified as "blue" but they actually look purple or lavender, so I call them as I see them.

Inside my cottage garden fence (perennials, shrubs and bulbs):

Light pink to deep magenta: cottage pinks, roses, azaleas, echinacea, mums, sedum, loropetalum

Lavender to deep Purple: allium, clematis, heuchera, scabiosa, lavender, perennial heliotrope, phlox, nepeta, petunias, buddleia, Dutch iris

Light Blue to Cobalt: Dutch iris, hardy geraniums, platycoden, salvias, rosemary, blue flag iris (in stream)

Pale yellow: daylilies, Lady Banks rose, achillea, Siberian iris

I have sown annual seeds of nigella, larkspur, poppies -- and will sow zinnias and cosmos and other annuals to fit the color scheme.

Outside the fence, I have the large borders with different sections of color:

Front garden: magenta, pink, pale yellow, purple, blue

Butterfly garden:
1) red, yellow, blue (salvia, gaillardia, coreopsis, achillea)
2) purple and orange (echinacea, allium, salvia, achillea, agastache)
3) red and orange (monarda, salvia, gaillardia, crocosmia

Fragrance garden:
Predominately white: ginger, magnolia, osmanthus, star jasmine, gardenia with blue in spring and the summer colors change. Based on green foliage.

Waterfall garden:
Foliage growing in the ground, but I use lots of containers on the patio. The color scheme varies each year, but an orange miniature rose grows year-round in a container.

Dry stream garden:
Japanese irises in white, lavender, purple; Buddleia in pale yellow and royal red.

I've cleared out two new sections for makeovers... more about those when I actually plant!

Cameron

Interesting conversation. I try very hard to have lovely color combinations and fail utterly and completely.
This is partly because I have bad taste, and partly because I am drawn to both saturated day-glo colors and muted tones.

I also love orange, but dislike it with blue or purple, which are its naturally complimentary colors. I also dislike red and yellow together (McDonald's). Since I have tons of orange and red flowers, I am always moving things around to try to stop things from clashing. It never works. I always end up with coral red pelargoniums next to pastel pink roses with a nice dark yellow-gold daylily thrown in for the puke factor. Screaming lemon yellow snapdragons with dark burgundy amaranth is another combination that will set your teeth right on edge. Pastel white-lavendar tb iris "Silverado" surrounded by screaming orange, gold and red nasturtiums, anyone?

Thank goodness for the Cottage Garden gallery.

Renee

I will admit to having been a planner early on but soon found that didn't work for me. No matter how well I planned I'd buy, or be given a plant, that had to be placed somewhere so the plan became much 'looser' and finally non-existent.

I now have but one *rule* and that is that those bright orangey red perennials are furthest away (really far away!) in my garden. I have only 2 plants with that color which are Oriental poppies and Maltese Cross. Last spring I moved the last of the Maltese Cross way out in the new beds altho the poppies are still about 40' from the front door which is too close for me. I'm seeding them further out as they don't like to be moved (altho I do successfully move them) and I have a huge swath of them. So it will take awhile as I'd have to fill in the large area they now occupy. I may get DH to help me move them all this spring. I do have red yarrow closer in but it's more a cerise red, not orangey so I don't mind that. Otherwise there are some combos I like such as chartreuse Lady's Mantle with a purple/blue delphinium. I have a lot of white which helps prevent too much color clashing. I have no orange perennials altho occasionally have planted orange annuals in places where there are blue perennials or early bloomers so they are only with green. I don't mind yellow at all and have a lot of it, especially in the fall.

If I had to plan my garden taking bloom color, time, foliage, size, etc. into consideration it would be no fun at all and I'd give up. I'm just not that organized and fortunately like a 'casual' garden.

My most color coordinated bed came about without my planning about color at all! I was becoming frustrated
because over 25+ years my long sunny border was no longer sunny. Maple trees do grow! and other things also. On looking for a sunny, dryish spot I settled on a narrow bed
rimming the "parking lot" for residents in our lower floor apartment. Not a very promising place. I was able to expand into a large triangular area at one side of the graveled lot. I started moving the sad plants from the
shade into the sun. Yarrows, Russian sage, even a yucca sprout, old non-identified bearded Iris, Siberian Iris,tall
artemesia, Purple emperor tall sedum just burst into growth in the sun. I began to acquire plants I hadn't had appropriate places for before: beautyberry, Dianthus fire
sprite, cerinthe. I edged the triangle with a late season
bargain of white hyacynths which I follow up with jewel-red-violet salvia splendens annual (bought starts), 3 bargain large bloom alliums. Love-in-a-mist and columbine
have come uninvited. All in all it has turned into a blue-violet, yellow-cream standout. Even the meter reader appreciates it as he comes by.

For me a cottage garden is all about pastels with a few slightly darker shades mixed in. When I think of cottage gardens I think romance and tranquility and those colors seem to say that to me.

I try to mix them all in and try to carry each color around my garden so that the eye will not focus too much on one area. I also try to do the same with plants that bloom at the same time and make sure they are spread around the garden so I don't have holes. My old garden roses help to do that and anchor the whole garden in as my roses bloom spring till frost (some even then!).
~Meghan

I tend towrd pinks and purples, even in the daylilys and iris, altohugh they have been planted helter skelter as I bought them. I do mix in some whites and yellows, but I have to have a "bright" bed with reds and oranges. And sometimes I mix it up.

The "bones" of my garden (birdhouse poles, benches, obelisks, pillars for the plants) are all a moss green which helps tie it together.

kay
kay