Our world is a riot of beautiful colors, and that extends into the aisles of the garden center. With all those choices to make, however, it can be difficult to know where to begin when designing a container for your garden. Just as authors can get writer’s block, gardeners can get designer’s block when faced with too many options. I’ve found that it helps to limit myself to one color. By choosing a single dominant color or a limited range of similar colors for a container, you’ll narrow your plant choices and find it easier to create a harmonious design.

When starting a container design, the first consideration is, of course, the pot. The safest choice for a color-themed design is one with a neutral tone, like that of concrete or cast limestone, because it will work with whatever plant color you use. Terra-cotta is great, but remember that it is actually orange-hued, so you’ll have to plan for that when choosing your plant colors. If, for example, your intention is to create a soft, frothy blue arrangement and you plant it in a terra-cotta container, the orange color of the pot is about as far away as you can get from blue, so the overall effect of the design might not be what you want. If you’d like a bit more excitement in your arrangements, you can choose a strong-colored container for your designs, but bear in mind that the color of the pot needs to enhance—rather than detract from—the overall effect of the composition.

Choose a foundation plant as a starting point

After settling on a container, look for a focal-point plant for the arrangement, one that speaks to you because you love its color, texture, form, or habit. Remember that if you choose a focal plant for its flowers and will be building a color scheme around the blooms, then it should be a plant that blooms all summer, like fuchsia (Fuchsia spp. and cvs., USDA Hardiness Zones 9–11), flowering maple (Abutilon spp. and cvs., Zones 8–11), or geranium (Pelargonium spp. and cvs., Zones 8–11).

I like to shop for the rest of the plants by placing my focal-point plant in a wagon and wheeling it around the nursery, looking for plants with features in the same color family. As you find them, place them in the wagon alongside your focal-point plant. Search for like colors in different shades, tints, and tones. If I’m working with a pure pink focal-point plant, for example, I’ll choose accompanying plants in anything from a pale pink to a deep burgundy. The contrast creates visual interest, and the sameness of the color family lets them harmonize and work well together.

Rearrange and edit to find the perfect combo

As you shop, keep replacing plants on your cart until you find a pleasing arrangement. Look for plants that will contrast with the focal-point plant in texture and height as well as for those that have similar cultural requirements. Also make sure you have something tall, something of medium height, and a few fillers and spillers. Once you’ve got a basic arrangement together, you can experiment by adding a dash of contrasting color to the grouping to see if you like it, but don’t let it distract from your base colors. Rather than being limited by using only one or two closely related colors, you’ll find that you have many more options than you might have imagined. When you finally settle on your perfect arrangement, pot it up and enjoy.

Play with your pots

One advantage of containers designed with a limited color palette is the opportunity to arrange groupings of pots together in color families and rearrange the groupings over the season to create lovely vignettes. Containers composed of lots of different colors aren’t as easy to combine with each other. I have a 35-foot-long border along one side of my property that holds 50 or so container plantings, and I’ve been working on creating a wave of color that segues from yellow though orange and on to red. You can do this on a smaller scale with only a few containers or expand it to fit your budget and time.

Think you’ll feel stifled by choosing just one color? Think again. If you design a container with one color, your combinations are bound to be harmonious and successful, no matter what color you choose—and that’s exciting.

Deanne Fortnam is a master decorative artist who puts her love of color to use in her Nashua, New Hampshire, garden.

Photos: Deanne Fortnam