Colourful Planting Design - Understanding a Gardener's Palette

Welcome to our talented designer Rachel Owens 2026 garden workshop series. These workshops will teach you everything you need to know about creating the garden you have always dreamed of. This course explores the way colour is used in the garden and how we can create our own unique planting pallets by understanding the relationships between different combinations. The morning will start with creating a personal colour wheel from paint samples and playing with the relationship between certain colour combinations. We will work through colour selections to include analogous, harmonious, complementary, split-complementary, triadic schemes. After lunch we will look at the way these relationships can work outdoors and how these combinations can be used to select plants for a scheme. We will look at examples by working garden designers and see how their ideas have adopted these schemes. Once we have analysed the chosen examples, we can start to think about what colour combinations we would like to transfer to our own gardens. Subjects Covered: Painting pallet work using different colour combinations Exploration of established colour combinations Exploration around colours and how this could relate to plants Examples of existing planting schemes Ways to use colour theory to start planning our own spaces The Venue: Our very own studio space is set within the grounds of Old Barn Garden Centre, Dial Post, South of Horsham.