Bring colour to your garden with designer Leonie Cornelius and Kildare's Colourtrend
You can see Leonie’s vision come to life at The Zarbee’s Garden at Bord Bia Bloom Festival in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, running from May 30 to June 3 between 9am and 6pm.
Award-winning garden designer Leonie Cornelius has teamed up with Kildare paint company Colourtrend to help established or budding gardeners bring a sense of comfort, nature and togetherness to their outdoor sanctuaries this summer, using carefully selected paints.
Colour is a powerful tool in garden design, often creating strong emotional reactions. It can influence our psychology, alter our mood and signify everything from danger to safety in our minds. Consider this: colour has its own language and we can learn to speak it.
Choosing colour for your garden is not always an easy task, however. Unlike the static nature of the indoors, home gardens are living, breathing, dynamic spaces that change daily, weekly and seasonally.
So how can we make the process of choosing colour for the outdoors more easy and joyful? Leonie Cornelius shares her expert tips:
- Observe your garden
Take some time to look at what your garden has on offer, in terms of location, planting, light, shadow and your existing home and its style. Consider the views from your garden and what colours and tones are happening beyond your site.
- Concept
Your concept tells a story that is uniquely personal to you. Form your own concept by creating a mood board that embraces your favourite tones and plants. A concept should also include ‘mood words’ which capture how you want to feel within your space. Pick up a Colourtrend paint brochure and lay out your favourite paint colours together with the plants you want to incorporate.
- Planting
Planting is what brings a garden to life. Look at the plants you have on your site and their colours throughout the different seasons. Think about what plants you want to add to your space and what story you’d like to tell. The choices for planting can be based on your favourite colour or a colour you would like to choose for a garden wall, fence or feature.
- Seasonality
When it comes to seasons you might have some existing plants on site that you want to work with. For example, your colour scheme could be built around celebrating the rusty tones of your garden’s trees in autumn or around the beautiful blossoms of summer. If you are planting new trees and plants, then your garden concept becomes even more important.
- Interior views
You should also consider the colours you have inside your home when designing your outdoor space. Colours used inside rooms that look out to the garden can be blended from inside to outside, creating an incredibly pleasing feeling of connection. This connection helps brings the garden into the home and vice-versa. Colourtrend makes this process easy and enjoyable as it has every finish in every colour, for inside and out.
Garden designer Leonie Cornelius said, “For me, using Colourtrend in the garden is a chance to play with colour and explore tonality and texture in the design. As a garden designer and an interior architect I really value the fact that Colourtrend is available in every colour, every finish and this gives me so much freedom to create a colour palette which works for my concept and also in harmony with nature - whether it is walls, features, furniture or accessories.”
If you’re looking for some inspiration, Leonie has created an incredible edit of colours using the Colourtrend range, which works wonderfully in tune with most planting schemes. It is a unique combination of rich colours based on texture and tonality, with warm, moody tones used to backdrop planting. You can see Leonie’s vision come to life at The Zarbee’s Garden at Bord Bia Bloom Festival in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, running from May 30th to June 3rd between 9am and 6pm. Óir - The Zarbee’s Garden at Bord Bia Bloom will be located in area 16 showcasing the rich hues of Leonie’s Colourtrend edit in her gorgeous pollinator-inspired balcony garden.