Color in Garden Design

Gardeners who feel their way with color--either through wild experiment or through cautious imitation of ""what works""--may balk at the preliminary chapters concerning color systems and vocabulary. But Austin, a garden designer who writes simply and plainly, has buried some treasures in this terrain: hue, value and saturation. Besides its basic hue (red, red-purple, yellow, yellow-green), every color possesses a degree of lightness or darkness (value) and a degree of purity or grayness (saturation). By distinguishing these ""attributes,"" a gardener gains a richer color awareness that breaks out of the simplistic ""warm colors advance, cool colors recede"" habit. The chapters that follow can be read intermittently, out of sequence--and merrily. Throughout, with the aid of 200 color photographs, Austin demonstrates how any color is perceived in relation to other colors, through the interplay of hue, value and saturation. In this context, the vague vocabulary of ""pastel, pale, vivid, rich, and muted"" is clarified beyond subjectivity. Unlike most garden color books, this title emphasizes background, or ""surround,"" colors for the influence they wield over accent colors, then extends the topic to other players like light, texture, time and distance. While readers can take varying doses of information for immediate results, over time, the book will give experimenting gardeners assured control and imitating gardeners the courage to create. (Jan.)