I LOVE that so many of you love the red gate!
It's such a simple thing really, isn't it - to paint a gate in a primary colour.
Many years ago I read an article about the American painter Robert Dash, by the late Rosemary Verey (Gardens Illustrated magazine June/July 1993). In his garden were a few very simple structures painted in zingy colours, and I tucked the images away in the back of my mind for use one day....
Several gardens later, and in a Swedish wooden house in Scotland with a bright yellow door, the idea came back to me as I stood looking from the sitting room window at the back garden. I had studied landscape design in Sweden, and had come across the work of the British architect Ralph Erskine there. He used primary colours on the doors and windows of his wooden houses. To my eye his colours just looked 'right'.
There is a recent trend among minimalists for Tiny Houses and you may like his small house he called The Box - astonishingly, built in 1941. Beautiful! (Though not with his signature primary colours.)
I like seeing now how all these influences, over many years, came together in what seemed at the time to come out of the blue as I stood looking out of the window -
'What the garden needs is a red gate.'
PS After I had written the above I kept browsing (as you do) and found to my amazement that a picture of my red gate is on Robert Dash's image page!! GOSH!
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