How to Use Pink in Your Flower Garden

Understanding Pink Flowers and Creative Ways to Use Them

Gardeners often have a strong opinion about the color pink. In truth, it can be a challenging color to work with. Read on to find out why that’s true, and learn some tips and techniques about how you can put the power of pink to work in your garden.

Cultural biases are the first challenge to overcome. Pink is a color that's often associated with sweets, babies, girls, cuteness, cotton candy and romance. When you're designing a garden or home landscape, cute is rarely the goal, so many of us write off pink flowers without giving them a second thought.

Yet pink is a color that can enhance almost every garden -- as long as you know what kind of pink you're dealing with.

As a pure color, pink does not contain yellow or blue. It’s simply a pale version of the primary color red. The band across the top in the image below, is pink in its pure color.

To alter this true pink hue, you can add white to get a “tint” or black to get a “shade”. Adding both black and white results in a “tone”. Tints, tones and shades are versions of the same hue. When they are used together, it's called a monochromatic color scheme.

The Difference Between Warm Pinks and Cool Pinks

When you change the temperature of a pure color, combinations begin to get trickier. This is especially true with pink. So when choosing plants for your garden, you need to be able to recognize the difference between a true pink, a warm pink and a cool pink.

Warm pinks have names such as coral, peach, salmon and strawberry. If you were creating these colors with paint, you would be adding yellow to a true pink hue. Warm pinks tend to be calming and easy on the eye.

The names for cool pinks include bubblegum, carnation, fuchsia, orchid pink and hot pink. These colors are made by adding a little blue to true pink. Cool pinks are more energizing and a bit edgier than warm pinks.

Though not a hard and fast rule, your pink flower garden will be more successful if you stick with hues on one or the other side of the warm/cool spectrum.

Designing With Warm Pinks

Most people would say red and pink don’t go together. But that’s not always the case. Warm pink echinacea (with its orange cones) actually works beautifully with warm red petunias and coral pink salvias. The key to success is keeping warm with warm. Had this garden included fuchsia petunias rather than dark red, the combination would not have been as pleasing.

In this vibrant wedding bouquet, posted on Flirtyfleurs.com, you see how beautifully warm pinks can be combined with orange and even yellow.

Teal blue is warm pink’s complementary color (opposite on the color wheel), so plants with blue-green foliage such as lavender, juniper and eucalyptus always make good companions. Grey-blues such as lamb’s ears and dusty miller, and olive greens also look great with warm pinks.