Is there another colour that dazzles quite like pink? I say “pink” so easily, but pink actually covers a whole range of colours: shocking, dusty, soft, luscious, shell, salmon, carmine, lipstick, sugar, flesh. Miraculously, Mother Nature manages to produce flowers in all these shades, from the most delicate to the almost unnaturally bright.
If you pick up a plant that combines that brightest eye-popping colour with a very large flower head, you have one very powerful visual effect to play with, but also something to keep under control. Because when some pinker-than-pink hibiscus or hydrangea is throwing platefuls of pure colour around the garden it ends up overpowering other plants. I’m not talking about that sour raspberry pink here, I’m talking about real 1960s Californian
