Jacques Majorelle

Who?  I would like to introduce you to an early 20th Century French artist who I can safely say has had a huge but inadvertent influence on popular garden design.  Quite simply he is responsible for blue: the use of blue paint and glaze for walls, fences and pots started with his beautifully laid out garden in Marrakech, Morocco in the 1920s where he used a particularly bright shade which is patented and named “Majorelle Bleu”.  The garden was widely publicised and much visited when owned by fashion designer Yves St. Laurent from 1980 to his death in 2008.  Nowadays we mostly use a less intense shade more suited to the light in our more northern latitude but it all started there and was reproduced in a Chelsea Flower Show garden in 1997.  So all those gardeners, including me, with a large blue pot to show off a choice plant should say “Merci beaucoup” to Jacques Majorelle.