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Garden Design

Garden design is a fascinating and complex job with extensive knowledge required of plants, hard landscaping, irrigation, lighting, soil and micro-climates, and of course, a flair for design is essential.

The use of colour in garden design creates a space unique to the owner, whether it be the use of soft pretty pastels for a country cottage feel or cool greys for a more modern look.

Thorndown Wood Paint is perfect for the garden. It’s eco-friendly, water-based and highly durable so will last outside for years. With thousands of colours available you can use the paint as part of your garden exterior design.

A country cottage theme can be enhanced by painting garden sheds or objects in pretty pastel wood paint shades.

These pretty little Small Storage Sheds from Forest are painted in Cheddar Pink and Golden Somer Wood Paint with Swan White fascias. Painted in bright yet soft pastels, they sit beautifully within the country cottage style borders adding height and attractive bursts of colour against the darker green tones of the hedge. 

Planting will obviously provide the basis for a colour palette but painting boundary fencing, masonry and garden features with wood paint is a quick and effective way of pulling the space together and elevating a garden design.

Light And Bright

Designers have a catalogue of great tips and tricks up their sleeves. Painting boundary fencing in a light colour will brighten a small garden and can make it appear larger if incorporated into the design correctly. Painting a large garden feature like a summerhouse in a bright colour such as Thorndown’s silvery Zinc Grey wood paint can make it appear closer as the eye is immediately drawn to it.

In the first episode of the 2018 series, Love Your Garden used stark contrasting colours to help a visually impaired lady see and navigate her garden. The light and bright Greymond wood paint contrasts beautifully with the elegant and rich Bishop Blue wood paint used on the summerhouse and steps. The garden designers on Alan Titchmarsh’s popular Love Your Garden series on ITV1 regularly use Thorndown’s wood paint colours to create attractive garden features and stunning designs.

Go Dark

The use of dark paint colours can be used effectively on boundary fences making them seem to disappear behind planting and giving the appearance of a larger space. Painting a border fence in a dark wood tone such as Blackthorn wood paint, created a natural look to a garden corner whilst helping the boundary to disappear and extend the garden further.

Dark colours from black to grey or dark greens and blues (Bishop Blue wood paint featured below) are also very effective at extending garden boundaries and adding rich colour compliments to planting.

Timber obelisks, arbours and sheds can also be painted in a dark colour like Thorndown’s Yew Green, to make them fade into the background and allow planting to be the stars.

Classically Elegant

Impressive stately features can be created from painting a timber garden structure in a classic colour. At Woburn Abbey, Forest created a relaxation area for garden festival visitors with their Burford Half Arbour painted in Thorndown’s Moorland Green Wood Paint. The result is a classically elegant feature that sits beautifully under a large cedar with the abbey as a backdrop. Unpainted the scene wouldn’t be half as attractive.

Small Features

Painting small garden accessories such as bird feeders will help protect them from rot and weather damage, and at the same time turn them into pretty garden features.

Terracotta pots can also benefit from a couple of coats of wood paint as it protects them from deterioration and first damage. It also creates instant pops of colour all around the garden.

Thorndown’s Wood Paint is a water-based high-performing eco paint for homes and gardens. Colour pigments used are architectural exterior-grade VOC free that perform at the highest level in light-fast and weather resistance tests, meaning that the colour you paint on will be the colour seen for years and years!