When I first had our seats made at Veddw I had to work out what colour to paint them.
I tried lots of colours and found pink kind of worked – but I thought it was weird.
Until I realised that the gravel, which is from a local quarry, is pink when wet. And when the fields are ploughed you can see – the soil is pink. (Ours isn’t – the result of years of mulching, I think, it’s dark brown). We’re on Old Red Sandstone.
And, of course, terracotta is pink/red and means ‘baked earth’.
It’s not easy to get this colour right. I had to mix it at first and I’m not sure I hit the spot. I can get masonry paint now in ‘terracotta’ – but it horrifies some people (like Helen Yemm!) and often comes out awful in otherwise good pictures of the garden. Blame Photoshop for that..
Too pink……
You’ve now totally destroyed my “illusion” that the seats were, in fact, a classy terracotta colour.
Over the last 5 years I’ve been working on the rear (ok, back) lawn to get it nice and level and lush and all the things you want your lawn to be. I’ve imported loads of top soil which was always black and, in some places, raised the lawn level by a couple of inches. I’m now repairing badger damage and notice that those 2 inches of black topsoil have all turned brown.
Though I wonder if the apparent pink of neighbouring soil is an optical/solar illusion and is it really terracotta-coloured?
You could very well be right and much more precise. Terracotta is what it ought to be given the derivation of the word. But our seats do look a little…umm..pink? (depends on the light)
I like pink in a garden. My client’s bench (see Facebook) comment may be cheap, but it was revitalized in Barbie pink, which looks pretty shocking – however it matches her pink tulips and the stripes on her kitchen curtains. Although I would prefer your terracotta pink for myself, my client loves this very much, it looks right in her garden, and she loves the look on the faces of visitors who either love it or hate it. We call it the Marmite bench
The colour looks strikingly different in different lights. I like the slightly brighter version — the pink in the final photo looks tired to me.
Yep, waiting for a re-paint. But it’s hard to get colour right in photographs. xx