I have found that gardeners are wary about using orange. Many think it a bad-taste colour. But it can work on a number of levels at different times of the year. This spring, I grew a lily-flowered, fragrant tulip called ‘Ballerina’. It is described in catalogues as terracotta, not orange, and it is a fantastic tulip that works well in containers or borders, although the thinly textured petals can scorch in hot sun. It performs in the second half of April here.

This year, some of the ‘Ballerina’ tulips poked up through a mound-forming polemonium called ‘Lambrook Mauve’ — by accident not design.

This April-flowering polemonium (or Jacob’s Ladder) is named after Margery Fish’s garden at South Petherton, Somerset.

It is a sterile form which bears masses of lavender-blue flowers over many weeks —reaching roughly 18 inches (45 cm) and it flowers in April. Each flower has an orange-yellow eye and the two enhanced each other — ‘Lambrook Mauve’ seemed bluer and the tulips looked more vibrant.

Orange deepens blue and it works in every season. I always conspire to grow my shimmering Helenium ‘Sahin’s Early Flowerer’ with Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’. Both plants are about a metre high, and both award-winning perennials conveniently flower together — usually in July.

You could use a moveable pot of true-blue agapanthus close to orange flowers as well, or add the burnished orange Crocosmia masoniorum behind the summer-flowering blue Aster x frikartii ‘Monch’.

This year’s Chelsea Flower Show and a visit to Derry Watkin’s Special Plants near Bath (01225 891686/ www.specialplants.com) taught me another thing about orange.

It makes sombre dark-purple and moody blacks more dramatic. So the flat-looking tulip ‘Queen of Night’ glowered more strongly when it was floating over the frilly, double orange geum ‘Princes Juliana’ in Derry’s garden.

You could equally well use the flame-topped Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fireglow’ or the slightly shorter ‘Dixter’ in shade. Or if the position is sunnier, there are now bright-orange perennial wallflowers and they include Erysimum ‘Apricot Twist’.

The Chelsea show gardens always rely on several stalwarts including the black-leaved cow parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Raven’s Wing’ and the dusky Aquilegia vulgaris ‘Ruby Port’. Several gardens and stands added a blaze of orange and turned these two monochrome plants into technicolour.

The Hardy Plant Society’s brilliant stand at this year’s Chelsea achieved a Gold Medal. The star-arranger was Sue Ward. Sue gardens at 53 Ladywood in Eastleach in Hampshire and her garden opens under the NGS ‘yellow book’ scheme (tel 023 8061 5389).

Sue majored on orange foliage and tutored me in the art of placing those flame-coloured, shade-loving heucheras, the ones that I buy but fail to use well. Heuchera ‘Tiramasu’, which starts off yellow and turns flame-orange, was placed next to an orange epimedium labelled Asiatic hybrid. ‘Marmalade’, a ruffled rich-orange heuchera, set off the flowers of Epimedium x wushanense ‘Caramel’. ‘Peach Flambe’ picked up the pink-eyed terracotta Verbascum ‘Cotswold Beauty’.