The ideal bed for picking contains annuals and perennials, together with plants and shrubs for cutting for their foliage colours. But there is also the question of what colour flowers to grow. Naturally this is more a matter of personal taste than anything else, and depends upon which colours you feel you want to see in your living-room.

A bed for cutting is, however, incomplete without some of the silver-grey foliage plants which complement all colours, both vivid and subtle. (They also do a lot to tone down red brick in a garden.)

Do not forget that any colour is intensified by a touch of white, or a tiny accent of its opposite colour. (This is as true in the growing border as in the container.) So do not limit yourself to growing flowers in shades of one colour.