Every year the hugely influential colour trend teams at Pantone, and Worth Global Style Network, each decide on a key colour : one that reflects leading fashion and style trends, and one that reflects our current emotional mood. Their thousands of clients, who control hundred of thousands of major brands, will take these colour trend predictions, and use them in our homes, our cars, our clothes, the packaging and products around us.
Colour of the Year
For 2024, Pantone has selected a soft pastel pink-orange, which they call Peach Fuzz.
The colour feels both modern and vintage, giving us the warm fuzzies for good times past and the confidence to face the future.The warm gentle colour brings, in Pantone's words :
"a feeling of kindness and tenderness, communicating a message of caring and sharing, community and collaboration.
A warm and cozy shade highlighting our desire for togetherness with others or for enjoying a moment of stillness and the feeling of sanctuary this creates"
"we are focusing on health and wellbeing, both mental and physical, and cherishing what’s special — the warmth and comfort of spending time with friends and family, or simply taking a moment of time to ourselves"
Worth Global Style Network chose their colour for 2024, a warm toasty peach-orange called Apricot Crush. WGSN focuses on our physical as well as mental wellbeing. They call Apricot Crush:
"[a] restorative, refreshing and energetic hue... Cultivating a hopeful and positive mindset...which also calls to mind the nutritional properties of vitamin- and antioxidant-rich oranges and apricots"
Peach Fuzz & Apricot Crush Plants
Could your garden use a metaphorical warm hug and a moment of peaceful comfort?Here's how to achieve that!
Peach Fuzz and Apricot Crush are perfect colours to use in gardens, for flowers and for foliage.
The colour palette is gentle, to complement other garden plants.It works in bold swathes, for hedging, and little pops of accent colour, through flowers. We've selected some plants to give you the look in your own back yard.
For instant on-trend garden style, plant these and you'll be instantly stylish in 2024!
Peach Fuzz & Apricot Crush : Key Foliage Plants
There are a few families of favourite garden plants that are made for this colour trend - and surprisingly, many are foliage plants, not flowering plants! These taller shrubs and hedging plants will bring the peach fuzzies into your garden. Clockwise, top left: For subtropical and frost-free gardens, Acalypha Inferno and Firestorm make fast-growing informal hedges full of warm cosy colour, and living up to their names. They keep their bright colours all year round. For colder climates, acers bring warm shades in abundance - when the new leaves emerge, and when the old leaves turn and fall. Two seasons of colour, with fresh green between. For bold bright colour, coral bark maple has coral bark, and leaves which are pale peach in spring, coral in autumn. For subtler tones, the parent species of Japanese maple Acer palmatum is gently coloured until mid-autumn, when it goes out in a blaze of apricot-copper-bronze.Several varieties of Syzygium and Acmena - lilly pilly - shine in peach and apricot when the new leaves emerge. Cascade is one of the peachiest and showiest! The long weeping leaves emerge in palest peach, turning deeper and richer through shades of apricot and orange-pink as the season turns. Pink phyllanthus gets its name from the lovely shell-pink shades of the new leaves; it's a little-known plant but it makes a beautiful feature shrub or a large hedge. Like Acalypha, it needs a frost free garden, and loves humid climates.
For smaller garden, smaller spaces, and planting alongside the larger foliage plants above, these smaller foliage plants are full of Peach Fuzz and Apricot Crush shades.
Clockwise, top left : Heucheras and heucherellas are superb foliage plants when it comes to introducing intense colour in small sizes. They are becoming better known amongst Aussie gardeners; usually grown in dappled shade, new varieties like this Hopscotch are bred to thrive in brighter sunlight too. Watch the leaf colours change as they grow!
Much more familiar to many gardeners are Nandina, or sacred bamboo. These resilient, rugged, ripper little bushes stand up to heat and cold and pump out the colour month after month. We love the delicately-shaded Gulf Stream for this trend - it suits it perfectly.
One of the best and brightest for Peach Fuzz moods is Coprosma Rainbow Surprise, a beautifully coloured variety of mirror bush that is vibrantly patterned all year round. Small and neat, it's easy to find a home for, even in a pot on the deck. Groundcover foliage favourite Alternanthera is usually found in purple and maroon but the patriotically-named Green and Gold glows in gentle peachy-pink hues through the year, especially in spring. The leaf colour is strongest in new leaves, so regular clipping will enhance it.
Peach Fuzz & Apricot Crush : Key Native Flowering Plants
We can't talk about peach and apricot colour in the garden without talking about grevilleas! There's so much choice to complement this colour trend, from feature shrubs with large focal flowers to small groundcovers and more natural looking hedging grevilleas. Clockwise, top left: our choices for larger showier shrubs with long seasons of flower are free-flowering Superb, brand new variety Strawberry Pops, super popular Coconut Ice, and compact favourite Loopy Lou. Whichever you choose, they'll all lure in the native bird life for a welcome feed!
Talking of birdlife, big bold showy flowers are favourites with us gardeners to give us big bangs for our bucks - but if you're a little bird, sometimes smaller flowers are better flowers. They're easier for small beaks to feed from; and because smaller flowers tend to nestle amongst the branches in abundance, they're safer for the birds to feed from too. So mix up your peach grevilleas - some big-flowered, some small-flowered - to get the best of both.
Clockwise, top left: These four grevilleas really lean into the soft and gentle, powdery-pastel feeling of Peach Fuzz. Tall winter-flowering Poorinda Elegance, sweet and petite Coral Baby, very tall Forest Rambler, ideal for informal hedges, and low and wide-spreading Sunkissed.
Peach Fuzz & Apricot Crush : Key Flowering Plants
The fruity shades of Peach Fuzz and Apricot Crush are tailor-made for tropical gardens - not just peach and apricot but mango and papaya and tamarillo and passionfruit and loquat and pink grapefruit too! For deeper richer tones, we choose: Clockwise, top left: the riotously frilled hibiscus El Capitolo, rugged and drought-resilient oleander dwarf Apricot, lush evergreen ixora, this one's Peach Delight but there are several varieties in this colourway, and marmalade bush Streptosolen. It's a brighter orange, complementing the paler shades perfectly and flowering almost every month of the year.
Want still more Peach Fuzz flowers to add colour to your back yard? You got it!
Clockwise, top left: Hibiscus Mrs Andreasen has the ruffled exuberance of El Capitolo in a paler peach-lemon shade; while cape daisy Osteospermum comes in many shades; Serenity Sunset changes from buff-stone shades to sandy pink shades are the flowers mature.
We've snuck in this pretty peach foxglove as annual and biannual plants are perfect for adding high fashion colour to a garden fast, without long term commitment. Like a bright accessory on a classic outfit!
And if you love these peach and apricot tones, you can enjoy them all year in a frost-free garden with Russelia Tangerine Falls; it's a groundcover, an informal hedge, and will weep attractively over a rockery or wall.
Peach Fuzz & Apricot Crush : Key Bulb Flowers
Like the foxgloves above, bulbs are fantastic at adding fast colour to gardens - they do all their growing and flowering in a very short season, fading away into dormancy after the flowers fade.Thes summer bulbs : pompom dahlias, large-flowered dahlias, gladioli, and hippeastrum - are active on the site and available to buy in spring when it is time to plant them.
Spring bulbs also bring the peach-apricot vibes to a garden in a short time - especially the newer varieties of daffodil and tulip which break free of the usual primary-colour red-yellow-blue palette of spring.These spring flowering bulbs : single-flowered daffodil, tulip, calla, and double-flowered daffodil - are active on the site and available to buy in autumn-winter when it is time to plant them.
We hope this has given you fresh ideas for using Peach Fuzz & Apricot Crush plants in your garden. Why don't you give one of them a go for 2024?
