Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Colour me beautiful

I'm useless with colour. I'm not one of those people who can unerringly point to the hue that is just right for the living room/bedroom/garden furniture. If I'm having any remodelling done, I ask the decorator, Ralph, to choose a colour. I'm serious - he has good taste, and it saves me hours of dithering over paint charts.
I know lots of gardeners who are good with colour - who paint their trellis, their shed or their front door just the right shade of greige, or sea-blue, or dark green. Oregon gardener Grace Peterson has a header picture on her blog that includes a cherry-red trellis which looks gorgeous. I hanker after colour too - but I'm too much of a scaredy cat to commit myself with a brush. The most I've ever done is paint a couple of seed trays (below) - and let's face it, that's hardly Sistine Chapel level.

Indeed, merely painting the seeds trays involved hours of dithering over the Cuprinol Garden Shades range in the local DIY store. The colour is Seagrass, and I can't remember why I chose it. I was initially drawn to Sunflower, but thought it might look like raw yellow wood, rather than yellow paint. This also put me off using Terracotta, Berry and Deep Russet, as I thought it would end up looking New Fence colour.
I did think of mixing colours - Country Cream with Sunflower, to get a pale creamy yellow - but chickened out. I thought it might look a bit Country Living as opposed to Urban Jungle.
I don't like blue, so that ruled out Barleywood, Iris and Forget Me Not. And I'm not really a Lavender person, though I can see it might look very pretty in some gardens.
So what do YOU think? If I were to paint the bird table below, which I have often thought of doing, what shade should it be? Should I go back to Sunflower? Or should it be Seagrass, like the seed trays? And whatever colour I paint it, should I paint my old garden bench to match? I'd like something that looked vaguely Oriental, or Caribbean, rather than shabby chic. Or should I just leave it?
Can't wait to hear your thoughts.