Butter yellow is trending – and these 7 stunning yellow garden flowers might just change your mind about this divisive color

For those of us who prioritise the aesthetic success of our gardens, it is often all too easy to play it safe when it comes to playing with color. Certainly, for most, the suggestion of incorporating a canary yellow in our garden schemes can make us recoil in horror.

Although yellow has fallen dramatically out of fashion, fashions in gardening, as with anything else, are mutable, so it's best to ignore them altogether and chug on regardless. Yellow, in some form, is essential to all garden color schemes. It cuts through the sugary sweetness of purple and pink, and is always a happy bedfellow with green. The key lies in which type of yellow you incorporate.

Opt for honey-hued yellows, rich ochres, earthy mustards, and desaturated whitewashed yellow hues and pale blonde beiges. Incorporating a soft, yellow color palette will breathe life into your borders. Here are seven yellow flowers which prove that yellow deserves a renaissance in your garden.

 7 of the best pale yellow flowers

1. Cephalaria gigantea (Giant Scabious)

Giant yellow scabious is one of my all-time favorite must-have perennials for your garden. They're highly floriferous and bloom for a remarkably long time, producing pastel yellow pincushion flowers for months on end.

Being one of the best plants for pollinators, they are always teeming with butterflies and bumblebees. I use these plants often, as they make comfortable bedfellows with almost any other color - not something you can often say for a yellow flower. If not deadheaded regularly, they self-seed readily, which is a boon in my opinion, sprouting up along borders with their stout, upright stems.

Yellow scabious not only looks magnificent towering at the back of a mixed herbaceous border, as it sways lustily in the wind, but it makes the most beautiful cut flowers. Truly, most flower borders would benefit from their gentle, barely-there pale lemon hue that adds an optimistic, but certainly not garish, dash of sunshine to mild, hushed borders.

Shop these giant yellow scabious seeds available at Ferri.

Aspect: Full sun or partial shade

Flowers: May-August

2. Digitalis lanata

The Grecian foxglove (Digitalis lanata), sometimes fondly referred to as 'the woolly foxglove', is a wonderful alternative to the typical digitalis varieties, often in cottage gardens and wildlife garden schemes.

It's a dashingly handsome, unusual, tall, biennial with dense, woolly spikes of creamy butter-yellow flowers. I first laid eyes on this uncommon digitalis variety at Great Dixter, a 15th-century house and garden in Sussex, England, where it added sparks and lilts of floral interest to hushed borders.

Of course, as with all foxglove varieties, they look simply perfect alongside roses and other cottage garden staples, but truly, they look marvellous in any naturalistic planting design.

Shop these grecian foxglove seeds available at strictly medicinal seeds.

Aspect: Partial shade

Flowers: June and August.

3. Cosmos bipinnatus 'Xanthos'

This delicate annual cosmos is fairly new on the scene and has already rapidly become the 'it girl' amongst true cosmos lovers.

If you are planning a cut flower garden, you will already be wise to the many different types of cosmos, most frequently seen in a virginal white or carmine pink.

Though this variety is much less ubiquitous, the quiet butter yellow petals are so graceful and ethereal - simply stunning.

When it comes to companion planting, it's hard to go wrong. I suggest pairing it with other blonde flowers, such as Salvia 'lemon light', as well as acid green found in Alchemilla mollis, and Zinnia 'queen blush lime.'

Shop these Cosmos bipinnatus 'Xanthos' seeds available at Burpee.

Aspect: Full sun

Flowers: June - October

4. Rosa 'Tottering-by-Gently'

One of the best English shrub roses for mixed border ideas, this David Austin rose hits all the winning points. It serves as a banquet for the bees and butterflies, tolerates all soil types without a fuss, and flowers its socks off from May right through to Christmas, when it produces the most delightful rosehips, which birds devour.

This repeat-flowering rose produces a mass of honey colored and scented flowers, which will quickly squander any previous thoughts you might once have had that you didn't like yellow roses.

So far removed from the garish yellow tea roses that have fallen out of favor in recent years, this single-flowered variety is far more delicate and natural.

The sunny, small petals are perfect for decorating cakes, puddings, or baking. They are also a beautiful, scented addition to jugs of iced cordial or summer cocktails.

Shop Tottering-By-Gently rose at David Austin Roses.

Aspect: Sun or partial shade

Flowers: May - first frost

5. Alcea rosea ‘Lemon Light’

The hollyhock is a classic English country cottage plant. This 'Lemon Light' cultivar is particularly glorious, though - its blooms are a soft shade of pale cream with the slightest tinge of a radiant yellow pigment, which lights up the flower garden for three to four months over summer.

Hollyhocks have lofty silhouettes that serve as dramatic sculptural elements throughout borders. They come in a variety of colors, though none quite as tantalizing as this zesty citrus hue, which may be preferred in sun-drenched borders rather than the saccharine pinks you see most often.

Shop these mixed hollyhock seeds available at Ferry Morse.

Aspect: Full sun

Flowers: June - September

6. Helianthus annuus 'Pro Cut White Lite'

Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) deserve a comeback. Although many gardeners love them, sunflowers are much maligned by those who prefer more hushed palettes. Though in my opinion, these plants are so much more than the full-throttle happy sunshine plants they are believed to be.

Many sunflower varieties are sublimely beautiful, hanging their heads down shyly and then whipping them up to the sun as soon as it emerges.

There are chocolate sunflowers, which are ludicrously romantic and theatrical, mammoth sunflowers which, as befits their name, are truly colossal, spanning up to 14 inches across, and even groundcover sunflowers that self-seed prolifically.

Helianthus annuus 'Pro Cut White Lite' is one of the most tasteful sunflower varieties to grow, with creamy petals and pale golden yellow and green centres. They're so unusual and supremely stylish.

No overly sugary or sunny bombastic yellow pigment, but a gentle, understated, breezy yellow tinge. These are available at specialist nurseries, but its sister cultivar, Helianthus annuus 'Italian White' is far more readily available in seed form.

Shop Helianthus annuus 'Italian White' seeds available at Eden Brothers.

Aspect: Full sun

Flowers: July - September

7. Iris 'Dreaming Yellow'

In my opinion, every garden should feature irises. The Iris genus comprises approximately 270 species. Iris 'Dreaming Yellow' is a less commonly spotted herbaceous perennial iris with the most striking form and glorious emerald-green, glossy leaves.

Its petals are white with bee guides in the prettiest sherbet lemon hue. It's a gentle and low-octane way of introducing yellow into your garden color scheme without overwhelming the palette.

Shop Iris 'Dreaming Yellow' available at Fieldstone Gardens.

Aspect: Full sun

Flowers: May - June

If you think yellow can't be incorporated into a garden scheme without it looking vulgar or clashing, these seven heavenly plants are all evidence to the contrary. I'm charmed by every one of them, not least for their smile-inducing qualities, certainly one way to feel happier at home.