Bold and bright: easy planting ideas for adding eye-popping colour to window boxes and pots this summer

Fashion's zingy new colours are also hot for summer gardens.

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Alex Mitchell13 May 2018

You only have to glance at the windows of any high street fashion store to see that the colours this season are feel-good, playful Crayola brights of orange, pink, red, marine blue and yellow.

These zingy shades shouldn’t be hidden away in your wardrobe — but why not splash them around the garden, too?

Rid yourself of sophisticated white for a change and style up your outdoor space for the new season using full-on colour with these easy planting ideas for window boxes and pots.

TOMATO RED

Eye-popping brights starred on spring/summer catwalks. Get the look in the garden with geum Mrs J Bradshaw
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Energising, irresistibly bold red-orange is one of Vogue’s key colour trends for this summer and it’s all over the shops right now.

If you love this shade, bring it out on to balconies or windowsills by planting pots with the wonderful geum Mrs J Bradshaw which will flower its heart out in early summer, along with seedlings of the charming annual corn poppy papaver rhoeas — cram in 10 seedlings to a hanging basket or medium pot — or the taller oriental poppy Wisley Beacon, one to a container.

Don’t hold back with terracotta pots of Geranium Bright Red on walls or over railings — they’re £18.99 for 60 plug plants from Crocus, so share them with friends.

You’ll find the same fun shade in crocosmia Lucifer and the Mexican sunflower Tithonia Red Torch (seeds £1.99 from Suttons) which can reach a metre tall and is a real butterfly magnet.

Bung it in the middle of the border or give it a large container at least 40cm diameter.

SKY BLUE

Desert bluebells can be planted in large pots and borders
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The sort of deep-blue sky you want to see as you laze on a Greek beach, this bold gentian shade is a pure, proper blue, without hints of purple.

Bring it easily into small spaces with plugs of trailing lobelias such as Sapphire, from garden centres or markets.

Cram them into pots, window boxes and hanging baskets for instant colour.

You’ll also get this shade from the rockery ground cover plant Lithodora Heavenly Blue, flowering now, and later in the summer from luscious exotic salvias such as salvia patens Guanajuato or salvia guaranitica Black and Bloom.

For large pots and borders it’s not too late to sow one of Vita Sackville-West’s all-time favourite plants, the desert bluebell phacelia campanularia.

Or plant Delphinium Faust for old-school cottage garden spires.

MEADOWLARK YELLOW

Get the meadowlark yellow look in your garden with Rudbeckia
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No tasteful pale lemon but a bold, lively yellow — seek out the kick-ass shade of Uma Thurman’s tracksuit in the Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill.

Get it into pots and borders with rudbeckias hirta Indian Summer and laciniata Herbstsonne, and with blowsy day lily hemerocallis Hyperion or by sowing seeds of annual evening primrose oenothera biennis.

In containers on a balcony, wake up to sunflower helianthus Lemon Queen, with its massive flowers from July till the autumn.

Give each plant at least a 30cm diameter pot.

FUCHSIA PINK

Just a little of this intense pink leaps out from foliage in pots or borders and it’s such a mood lifter, making you think of cocktail umbrellas.

For instant retina-burning pinks, look out for dahlias, zinnias, pelargonium Marion Saunders, osteospermums and even Busy Lizzie, back with a blast at B&Q this month after six years out of action due to powdery mildew.

But don’t forget carmine pink cosmos bipinnatus Dazzler.

Buy seed now, sow it with abandon on the surface of decent-sized pots or garden soil and wait for the zing.

EMERALD GREEN

Just one plant per pot of Japanese forest grass will show off your bright flowers at their best
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Fresher than a mown lawn on a dewy morning, the shade that’s currently in the fashion shops is ironically so very green that it’s hard to replicate in nature — in this hemisphere, anyway.

However, exotic Japanese forest grass hakonechloa macra will deliver it with its soft, arching fronds, little seedheads dancing on the ends when summer hits its stride.

One plant per pot dotted in among your bright flowers will be just the calm, fresh foil they need to show them off at their eyepopping best.

That’s the plants sorted. Now you just need to work out what to wear…

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