One of the most important decisions you will make when designing your meditation garden is colour. Colour affects both mood and memory. Colour will create the biggest affect and a wrong choice or choices can alter the space and make it the opposite of what you intended.

Colour affects our sense of space and distance as will as our emotions. Think of the expressions we use when describing our feelings, ever had a blue day or see red when angry? Environmentalists are referred to as greens and the talk about greening goes on and on.

Red can charge you or arouse your senses while blue has a calming, quieting effect. A meditation garden is a place to relax, to move beyond yoru daily concerns and business and clear your mind. Blues remind the eye and brain of cool waters and far away hills, for example; tranquil sights that we do not encounter, often, in our daily travels in an urban environment.

Consider a planting of delphiniums and other blue plants intermingled with some old-fashioned pinks and maybe a pink rose or three. A small water feature nearby can add the sound of tranquility to this setting.

The meditation garden does not need to be large; you could consider making a circle garden that is four feet across. A path shaped like a keyhole leads you to the centre of the circle where you could place a fountain, a favourite shrub, a rose bush perhaps and around that blue violas, veronicas, delphiniums and aconitums.

Monkshood is a member of the aconitum family; it is also known as wolfsbane. Monkshood requires full sun or light shade. It can live in the shade but the flowers get quite floppy with reduced sunlight. Monkshood does its best when it gets a minimum of six hours of full sun every day.

You may wish to place a comfortable chair in the keyhole rather than a shrub or fountain; a chair you can move to follow the sun or moon if you desire.

Speaking of following the sun a sundial is another possible feature but not one I would add in a meditation garden, I do not want to think about time when taking time away.

You may find all that blue a bit overwhelming. A few pink flowers in one bunch or scattered throughout may be the relief or change that you are seeking.

Old fashioned pink roses, sweet williams and foxglove are good choices to break up the blue but still remain calm and serene.

Now on the other hand you may want a site that recharges your batteries and a selection or red, yellow and oranges can be just the thing.

No matter what effect you are looking for from your meditation garden, colour will set the mood.