On Yellow
A survey says yellow is finally coming back into fashion. The gardens I keep going back to never let it leave.
The last colour to go is yellow.
I worked this out properly in June, standing out past nine with a watering can I’d forgotten I was holding. The pinks went first. Then the purples, flattening into a sort of grey felt, the way they do. But there was a clump of achillea by the shed that was still, somehow, on. Not glowing. Just present, when nothing else was.
I have been thinking about that evening because the RHS has a colour survey coming, run at Wisley, with something over eleven thousand people asked what they actually like looking at. Yellow came second in all four seasons, behind saturated red. Which sounds unremarkable until you know that European garden colour surveys have been putting yellow last for the best part of eighty-five years.
So the story writes itself. Butter yellow arrives in fashion, then in interiors, and now the garden catches up. Yellow rehabilitated. Yellow forgiven.
I understand why that’s the story. I just don’t think it’s the right one.
The gardens that never stopped
If yellow had genuinely been out, somebody should have told Great Dixter.
The giant fennel there does a thing I’ve never seen another plant manage. Ferula communis spends years being nothing much, a low mound of the finest, softest foliage, and then one spring it decides. Up goes a stem taller than you are, carrying plates of greenish-yellow umbels at head height, and the whole garden reorganises itself around it. It isn’t a tasteful plant. It’s a structural event that happens to be yellow.
Christopher Lloyd made the case for this decades before anyone was surveying anyone. In The Well-Tempered Garden he argued for tonal yellow schemes lifted with cream, on the grounds that they read at dusk almost as brightly as a white border but without the flatness that white has in daylight. By the end of his life he’d gone further and started enjoying the clashes: buttery primroses against the red new growth of peonies, chrome-yellow patrinia against mauve verbena. He also said the thing that I think ends the argument. “There are so many qualities of yellow, and none will fight.”
Then there’s Sissinghurst. The Cottage Garden was never an accident or a concession. Vita built it as a sunset garden, deliberately, in yellows and oranges and reds, and it has sat there being unfashionable and completely convincing for the whole time yellow was supposedly banished. Mullein self-seeding itself up through the middle of it. Nobody apologising for anything.
Neither of these is a fringe garden. They’re the canon. Which makes the fashion story quite hard to sustain.
A flare, not a flood
Here’s the thing, though. The designers who use yellow well are not filling borders with it. They’re using very little.
Rhododendron ‘Daviesii’ is the clearest example I can think of. It’s a Ghent azalea, and strictly speaking it isn’t a yellow plant at all: buff pink buds opening to cream, then to white, with a single yellow flare on one petal. That flare does everything. It’s the reason the flower reads as warm rather than cold, and it’s the reason the scent seems to arrive with a colour attached, which is nonsense but is exactly what it feels like standing next to one in late May. It wants acid soil and a bit of shelter, which rules it out for a lot of us, but if you have the conditions there is very little else like it.
The same restraint is why Rosa ‘Tottering-by-Gently’ has become the default yellow rose for people who thought they didn’t want a yellow rose. Single flowers, butter rather than gold, a ring of proper stamens in the middle. It looks like a plant rather than a product. Put it against a stone wall and it stops being yellow and starts being light.
And two summers ago Tom Stuart-Smith built a hazel coppice on Main Avenue at Chelsea, his first show garden there in fourteen years, and made it almost entirely green. Almost. Kirengeshoma sat in the shade waiting to throw its yellow wax bells later in the season. There was a Saruma in there too. In a garden that restrained, a single yellow is doing more work than a whole border of it would.
What yellow actually does
Yellow is the brightest thing your eye can see. That’s not a taste position, it’s just how we’re built, and it has consequences in a garden.
It means yellow holds on as the light drops. Everything else surrenders its colour and goes to grey, and yellow goes to pale, which is not the same thing at all. If you have a bit of garden you only really see on the walk from the car to the back door in October, yellow is what you want in it.
It means yellow is difficult in May and easy in August. Set it against the acid new green of spring and the two fight for the same register — this is where the “vulgar” reputation comes from, I think, more than anywhere. Set it against the tired, dusty green of late summer and it looks generous instead.
And it means yellow photographs badly. It blows out. It flattens. On a screen it reads loud and cheap, whilst in front of you it has depth and shifts constantly with the light. We have spent twenty years learning about gardens through photographs of gardens. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the colour that survives that translation worst is the colour we all decided we were above.
Where I’d put it
Small amounts. Repeated.
One plant of something yellow, three or five times down a border, will do more than a drift ever does. Put it where you walk past at dusk rather than where you look at it from a window in the middle of the day. Put it in shade, where it lifts rather than shouts. Give it something to work against, ideally green, ideally lots of it.
And if you’ve been talking yourself out of yellow because somewhere along the way you absorbed the idea that it was a bit much, it might be worth asking whose idea that actually was. The gardens never agreed with it.