I've been reading an interesting book on colour psychology recently (review to follow) and I found it utterly fascinating.

Written (back in the 90s) by a psychologist who specialises in colour and has designed everything from interiors to packaging, it is about people's affinity for colour - not the kind of colours that suit you, as we're all familiar with re the Colour Me Beautiful idea, but which colours you should surround yourself with in order to be happy, and what your colour choices tell you about your innate character.

I found it hit the nail on the head in my relationship to colour/design/work etc in some key areas in a way that nothing else has ever approached.

I'm familiar, of course, with the idea of matching your clothes to your skin, hair and eye colouring, but I had never thought before of the difference between admiring a colour and having an affinity for it. They are indeed two different things, and the feelings that you get from different colours tell you a great deal about yourself.

For ease of use, the book uses the familiar designations of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter but rather than this meaning your look (whether you have fair hair or dark eyes, etc), it refers to your character traits. What is more important to you, light or space? What shapes do you prefer, circles or ovals? What kind of job should you be in, front-of-house or back-room?

Four colour/shape palettes were shown and I was surprised at the strength of my reactions to them - I LOVED the Summer palette (wavy shapes and cool, greyed-out colours), and liked the Spring palette a lot (circles, in bright colours such as lime green and lemon yellow), but actually shuddered at the Autumn and Winter palettes (respectively, squared-off shapes in shades like mustard, and sharp triangles in primary colours).

After filling in the attached 10-question questionnaire, I came out very firmly as Summer (7) with a Spring subordinate (3).

The descriptions of the Summer personality were bang on: shy, snobbish, rather reserved, likes opals and moonstones and cabochon-cut jewels, prefers oval plates to round ones and likes all the china to match, goes to great efforts at dinner parties, is thought rather boring by many people, enjoys opera and classical music, painstaking and skilled with her hands. That's a very good description of me.  

A typical Summer, however, is rather a formal person, which I'm not, and here I tend more towards the Spring character - requires a great deal of light, suffers from SAD, is claustrophobic and casual. But the typical Spring also has a sparkling, bubbly personality and makes a good PR person, which is not me at all.

The Autumn personality, it will be no surprise to hear, likes rusty, reddy, mustardy colours, olive greens, brick, stone and wood, and tends to be a person of substance who lives in the country, while Winters are the high-achieving, thrusting, urban ones among us, who like sharp lines, strongly contrasting colours and clean, modern interiors.

It will also come as no surprise to hear that the Scandinavian countries have the highest percentages of Spring and Summer personalities, while Autumn personalities tend to predominate in the African and Asian continents.

When the DH got back from his trip to London, I got him to go through the questionnaire, and to identify what he liked best from the colour palettes and to my surprise, he came out strongly as Spring, with a Winter subordinate (the latter because space is incredibly important to him and he likes monochrome interiors and line drawings).

This was apropos of trying to work out what colours we could compromise on in the house, because our needs are slightly different. Space is the DH's big thing. He can't stand the furniture being pushed too close together, or low ceilings, or feeling cramped in any way. When it came to colours, although he could live with any, the only ones he liked (just nine from all the palettes) were all shades of blue and soft green, exactly the colours he wears every day.

For me, light is the crucial thing. I feel completely miserable if I can't get outside every day, and dark, cosy interiors make me feel totally depressed (I love visiting interiors like this but couldn't live in one). I am welded to my SAD lightbox all winter and when the days grow short I find it hard to get up or to stay awake. I can visit a lovely country pub and enjoy the fire and the inglenook and the dark, heavy beams, but in my own house, what I want is white, white and more white.

And luckily, our needs, although different, overlap. There is no battle between light and space. We have already decluttered the house considerably and in order to maximise light, we are gradually turning the house as white as we can get it. While he was away, I began to paint over the stonework our window recesses, and the difference it made was just amazing: when he got back, he gave me the nod to carry on and do the rest.

We now intend to paint over almost all of our exposed granite, hang white curtains (again, the difference this makes is striking) and paint all the wooden furniture white or give it a limed finish. Soft furnishings will be pale shades of duck-egg blue, yellow and orange, aqua, and sky blue and pink - all colours that are light, bright and 'gay' (in the old sense of the word).

The colour theory idea doesn't work only for us. On the last girls night in, I also tested four friends. Two came out as Summer with a Spring subordinate (we are very common in Western Europe), one as a strong Autumn and one - a 12-year-old - as a very definite Winter. That made us all laugh, as she is going through a Goth phase, painting wounds all over herself and wearing black, while our Autumn friend, we all know, has a low-ceilinged, oak-beamed house filled with Moroccan ornaments and Berber rugs, and herself wears mostly khaki and rust. I know nothing of friend E's interior, but it might explain why friend N is always complaining about her exposed stone walls with pink mortar, and keeps the living room lights on all day long…

The book - sadly costing £32 even second-hand - is The Beginner's Guide to Colour Psychology by Angela Wright. More about it later.



 

Back in October last year, the DH and I finally saved enough money to install our pond. It was something we'd wanted to do for a long time, but we ummed and ahed over the cost, given that there are still so many things that need doing to the house.

But if we had known how many hours of pleasure it would give us, we would have done it years ago. I knew that having a pond would be 'nice', but I really didn't realise how totally absorbing and fascinating it would be, nor that we would spend every possible moment down here with our laptops and mobiles, reluctant to move indoors.

This is a wildlife garden, so we opted for a wildlife pond, focusing on invertebrates, not fish. (Fish may end up in there, but not by our design.) We took instruction from How to Make a Wildlife Garden by Chris Baines, which has been our bible in creating this garden, and followed his instructions pretty much to the letter, creating deeps and shallows, a bog area, 'steps' for critters to get in and out and planting native species.

The result has been amazing. No sooner was the pond filled with water than creatures began to colonise it. The very next morning, it was full of water boatmen and pond skaters, then little black water beetles, then a Southern Hawker dragonfly, some 75mm long, laid her eggs all around the edge.

We begged a starter bucket of mud and weeds from M, a friend with an established pond, and with that mud came a whole host of creatures, including thousands of snail eggs, which - once hatched out - have acted as the vacuum cleaners of the pond bottom, hoovering up algae and rotting vegetation. Occasionally the water goes cloudy, but there is, as yet, no sign of blanket weed or an algae problem, thank heavens.

M also gave us three clumps of lilies with curly pondweed attached (fabulous oxygenators, which spread quickly and efficiently), and I scoured the local streams for other plants such as starwort, water mint and water forget-me-not (I don't feel bad about taking a few clumps of these, as the streams are choking with them, due to fertiliser runoff from the adjacent fields).

Another plant or two has piggybacked, too, including a quite handsome affair with complicated leaves (don't know what it is) and some floating grass with red stems. From another friend came clumps of yellow flag iris, and from another's reed filtration bed, phylaris and other sorts of tall grasses for the bog garden.

Within a week, wriggling creatures were visible in the depths and whirlygig beetles appeared, dodging round each other on the water surface like little beads of mercury.

Now, in May, and despite the terrible drought, the pond is beginning to look wonderful. The curly pond weed has spread like mad, burrowing its way through the mud, and one of the lilies has opened (pink rather than white, much to my surprise, given it was labelled 'alba').

Digging a pond obviously results in a spoil heap and rather than moving this, we spread it out a bit and dug another small pond into it about 1m in diameter. This is intended to become a bog garden, and is very shallow, but it was also instantly colonised with wildlife. The bank itself we randomly planted with whatever seed we had hanging around, including bird seed, which has resulted in a forest of (I think) black mustard plants, clover, poppies and rapeseed, again giving food for visiting insects, and cover for frogs and lizards.  

From being a rather blah part of the garden, which we often skirted around on our morning walks because there was nothing in it, the pond has become the main focus of the entire garden. For weeks now, it's been alive with dragonflies and damselflies, flitting around like mobile flowers. There are blue-grey Broad-bodied chasers, the deep turquoise Beautiful Desmoiselle with its black, fluttering wings, Small Scarlet Damselflies and little turquoise ones (I can't get close enough to work out which species). I had expected one or two, but not 70 at a time, filling the air with colour. The other day, we even had a kingfisher, and a pied wagtail takes a noisy bath each day, using a dead log as a perch. Even bees come down for a drink, landing on the rocks, then cautiously sidling to the water's edge, and in the dusk, the bats appear, skimming the water for moths.

Our cats, which we thought would be fearful, are curiously fond of the pond and love to lie on the railway sleepers, gazing at the water. Birds comes down to drink (as evidenced by the droppings all around), and in the winter, when it was topped with snow, a rabbit had clearly hopped across the frozen surface.

Fifteen bundles of frogspawn resulted in thousands of tadpoles, most of which have gone the way of all tadpoles (they have a survival rate of 5 per thousand), but the bigger ones are now turning into tiny frogs. We even have a palmate newt, which gently tucks her miniature arms into her sides and swims along like a mermaid.   

Being by water is a deep, atavistic pleasure (after all, we humans can't survive without it) but it also teaches you to observe. I did not know that male damselflies clasp the females by their heads and tow them around while they lay their eggs, so they don't become too exhausted; that they pierce the leaves of lilies and plant their eggs inside;  that chasers mate on the wing, and the male then flies around guarding the female while she lays by dipping her abdomen repeatedly into the water; that hawkers (single parents, all of them) land and carefully fold their bodies to position their ovipositors, laying their eggs one at a time; that snails sleep by turning upside down and floating their big foot on the water surface; that water beetles float to the top and at the last minute, turn and poke their bums out of the water, trapping air under their wing carapaces, then dive back down again.

A pond, however small, affords so many lovely sensations - rain pattering on the lily leaves; reflections of the surrounding rocks and plants, or the sky on a sunny day; cherry petals floating on the surface; our Zen-like cats, sunbathing on the rocks, or lapping at their mirror image in the water.

I would advise everyone - if you possibly can, put one in, even if it's just a 2ft square butler sink with a clump of horsetails. You'll be so glad you did.

Available at: Amazon.co.uk

The wabi-sabi home (see previous articles) needs to be uncluttered and free, and one good place to start is with your flooring.

Floors are crucially important to the overall feeling of a house or a room. After all, they take up one sixth of the entire surface.  

In the wabi-sabi house, floors should be as plain as possible (no screaming patterns) and made of smooth, hard materials because these are easy to sweep clean, easy to wash and easy to maintain. Personally, I also hate the noise of the Hoover and would far rather sweep and wash my floors to get them clean. With hard floors, you need have no worries about dirt, or fleas, or stains, or your kids' asthma, and you can quickly go over them each day with nothing but a brush.

This may go against the grain for some people because most of us in the UK were brought up with the idea of using wall-to-wall carpeting wherever possible (kitchens and bathrooms aside, usually). Indeed, in some flats or apartments, it's damn near a requirement of the lease that you install carpeting, to reduce noise transferring to tenants below.

But carpeting floors is a very recent idea in interior design. For the majority of history, people made do with simple earthen floors that could be swept out on a daily basis, or - if they were wealthy - with floors made of stone or materials such as terracotta. Carpets were used as wall and table coverings - they were far too precious for floors.

Obviously, even the diehard wabi-sabi enthusiast wouldn't advocate a return to beaten earth, but I would say think again about carpet.

Carpets are pretty filthy things, especially the wall-to-wall type, where it's hard to get into the corners. Even rugs can be pretty filthy things. If you're not sure about that, try taking a smallish rug and vacuuming it 'clean', then put it over a washing line and beat the bejasus out of it. The amount of extra dust and crap still in there, even with daily vacuuming, gives one pause for thought. 

Hard floors - throughout the house - needn't mean unwelcoming by any means. Although ground floors benefit from terracotta, quarry tile or ceramic, most of us prefer slightly warmer flooring on our upper stories. Wood, cork, linoleum and rubber are all finishes that are both natural and hard-wearing, while vinyl sheet or tile feels great underfoot and now comes in a fantastic range of finishes and thicknesses. 

The most wabi kind of floor is probably the self-finished surface that needs no additional treatment - wooden floors that construct the ceilings of the rooms below, or materials such as polished, dyed concrete. If you are ever in the position of being able to commission a house, it's well worth thinking of a poured finish such as concrete or terrazzo (cement embedded with marble chips). Although expensive to lay, these floors, once in, require virtually zero maintenance and have no nasty cracks and joins where dirt can lurk. They are also beautiful, and the seamless finish makes a small room look larger.

If your budget can stretch to it, real stone floors such as limestone or slate give you a true connection to the earth and a feeling of solidity beneath your feet. Finished slate is easier to clean than stone flagging, though - if you have inherited a flag floor, consider doing what people used to do in times past and wax it very often until a good thick layer has built up: also makes the stone much warmer. 

For the rest of us mere mortals, I'd recommend ceramic tile downstairs and cork or something similar upstairs, using neutral colours such as beige, grey or cream throughout the house. You need finishes that go with everything, as re-laying a floor of this kind is a big fat pain. A colour like biscuit or limestone is very livable-with, no matter what your decorating scheme. 

In my house, the living room takes up the whole ground floor of the house (there's no dining room or hallway), and it's floored in terracotta. Although very beautiful, it does stain, so I wouldn't recommend it to others. Quarry tiles contain more quartz and therefore fire to a harder finish, so they stain less, which makes them preferable to terracotta. Nevertheless, given my druthers, I would relay this floor with white ceramic tiles. Ceramic has a glass-hard finish and is far easier to clean than either quarry or terracotta. Obviously, it also comes in an almost unlimited range of finishes, especially here in France where people don't generally use carpet. My local DIY shop has ceramic floor tile in fake slate, fake parquet and fake floorboard finishes, among others. 

The upstairs of a house is no less suited to hard floors. While you may prefer to carpet the stairs for noise reasons, for instance, it's well worth seeing if wooden stairs are as noisy as you think they'll be. They can look especially pretty with tiled risers and good thick treads in oak or pine, but even a plain painted staircase is attractive. I ripped out my stair carpet a year ago and infinitely prefer the look and ease of maintenance of my white and grey-painted pine stairs. If you absolutely have to carpet, try to choose a natural finish such as coir or seagrass, though be careful to follow manufacturers' recommendations on slippage. 

With hard floors in bedrooms there are no more grimy areas under the beds or dust bunnies breeding under the wardrobes - everything can be cleaned in five minutes with a vacuum cleaner. Upstairs, here, we were gutted, when we peeled away the previous owner's carpets, to find nothing but chipboard underneath. We had expected nice oak floorboards, but it was not to be. We thought of installing them but there was also the issue of low ceiling height - about 6' 6" on our middle floor, so we were reluctant to reduce this even further by inserting thick wooden parquet. What came to the rescue was cork and vinyl tile.

Cork tile comes in a range of different finishes, including colours and white, as well as its natural but pleasing 'cork' shade. If you want a pale colour, you can invest in one of the corks that has this built-in or you can paint it yourself with floor or yacht paint. I'd recommend the self-adhesive variety of tile that already has one coat of varnish. With this, once you've cleaned your existing floor, you can easily lay a whole room in a couple of hours. A couple of coats of quick-drying varnish to seal the lot and it's ready for use the next day. Cork is very soundproofing, warm underfoot and works well for bedrooms and other areas that don't get very heavy traffic.

However, cork tile has proved hard to come by here in France, so for other areas upstairs we have used vinyl tile, and to be honest I find this even better, although it is a less natural product. We chose a very neutral bone colour vinyl with a faint parquet pattern and a satin, rather than shiny finish, and once again, laid a whole room in a few hours, even allowing for cutting-in. The vinyl is much tougher than cork and much more suitable for areas of heavy traffic such as kitchens and workrooms - we have it on our mezzanine and in our office.

Rubber was once considered a very industrial finish but in fact it works well in a practical interior. Friends of ours recently laid a rubber floor, with giant tiles nearly 3ft across, in a variety of colours (it was an end-of-line find). With two small children, they find their rubber floor eminently practical but still soft enough to dump a toddler on.  It also has the advantage that it can be loose-laid, provided the floor is screeded level first, so if an area should get damaged or stained, you can always swap the tiles about. 

The next time you consider buying a new carpet, think again and consider a hard floor instead. I estimate that I've reduced my housework time by about 75 per cent just by getting rid of the carpets, and frankly, that's time I'm glad to have back. 

I normally do this on the first of April, or the weekend closest to it, but this year's been so cold and dark, and spring so late, that I left it for the first proper spring day instead. For some reason this year (global warming?), we seemed to switch directly from winter to summer without really going through spring at all, and at the weekend, temperatures rose dramatically.

Changing over your house between winter and summer is a very wabi-sabi thing to do because it acknowledges the turn of the season and reflects the fact that you use your home in different ways in winter than in summer. Making dual use of your space in this way also makes it feel twice the size - like you have your very own holiday home.

In winter, you need your house to be more 'yang' - warmer, brighter colours and rich textures that comfort and cheer you through the cold months. You want to snuggle down and shut out the outside world.

But in summer, you want the opposite - cool, Yin colours, smooth fabrics such as linen, and lots of light and air. You want to open the windows and doors whenever possible, and embrace the view, which - if you're lucky - will be changing gradually to green.

The absolute best way to accomplish a changeover is to have a seldom-occupied spare room where you can keep your off-season items. Then in spring, and in reverse in autumn, you can make the switch easily.

The major change I always make is to take the winter curtains down. Who on earth wants heavy velvet drapes in summer? In winter, they're a godsend, because this house is on a hill and very exposed, but their fabric, and their rich colours of red and pink and peach seem stifling and stuffy when the weather turns. We're not overlooked, so I sometimes don't bother with curtains at all in summer, preferring to allow the light to flood in, but sometimes I switch to white lace, or a set of curtains I made from old cream hemp sheets (very House and Garden). These are useful if the weather gets really hot, as you can draw them to keep the heat out and diffuse the strong light to a soft creamy white. Off-season curtains are stored in flatpacks in the spare room.

I gave up rugs a year or two ago and I loathe fitted carpet in any case (too insanitary and difficult to clean). We only have hard floors now - terracotta, wood parquet, cork or hard vinyl tile, depending on which room you're in. But in the days when we still had rugs, I would roll them up and put them away in spring. If you can't do this for reasons of space, consider turning them over instead, if they have a jute backing, for a summery look, then flip them back to the pile side for winter.

The changeover idea works best if your furniture has slipcovers rather than - or in addition to - permanent upholstery. When we bought our sofa, we bought two sets of loose covers, so in winter we have an aquamarine and navy blue scheme, then in summer we switch to yellow and aquamarine. The sofa is a large piece of furniture and this change of covering alters the whole ambiance of the room.

If your furniture is close-covered, you could have loose covers made for it for summer, or think about using summer throws in fabrics like linen or cotton, which will be cooler to sit on than Dralon, leather or velvet. A set of matching throws in a cool colour like primrose, cream or pale blue can take the visual heat out of any colour scheme. Put any loose cushions away for summer, too, for a cleaner, more spare look in the summer months.

Also consider moving your furniture about between summer and winter. In winter, you probably want your living-room furniture clustered around the fireplace, if you have one, but in summer, there's no sense in this if the fire isn't actually lit. Think instead about moving the furniture closer to the windows to make the most of the light, and creating more space between individual pieces to allow air to circulate.

Change your lightbulbs over too. In winter, in this dark house, I use 100w or 60w bulbs wherever possible, but in summer 40w is more than enough because there is so much more light from outside.

Finally, think about changing over your wall art with the season. I use obi sashes and kimonos on poles, which are readily interchangeable. I swap a heavy purple kimono for a gold one in summer, and black, red and orange obis for ones in shades of silver, pale blue and cream. Even though the mirrors and framed art remain basically the same, the 'feel' of the room is altered dramatically just by changing a few items.

Wabi-sabi arose from Zen Buddhism but it enables you to live a simpler and less-cluttered life whatever your situation or beliefs. Earlier I wrote about the tokonoma, a special alcove or area that you can have in a room as a focal point, but here I'll deal with surfaces.

In wabi-sabi, it's very basic: you keep your surfaces clear, and if you can't, you limit the number of things on them to three. Just follow this 'rule' and you'll find it all comes together easily.

To start, look around your typical living room and count how many surfaces there are. In mine, which is a living-dining room, there are eight:

* a centrally placed sideboard used as a room divider

* a sideboard in one corner

* a coffee table

* a dining table

* a marble-topped buffet running along one wall

* and three deep windowsills (this is a French house and the windows open inwards)

All of them just asking to get filled up with tat.

The marble-top buffet had all the CDs and DVDs on top of it, which was fine as long as they were neatly arranged in their storage units. Problem is, they never were - they were stacked up 10 deep, constantly waiting to be refiled. My sideboards seemed to have the habit of collecting whatever was meant to be stored in their drawers and cupboards, while my coffee table, like many people's, rather defied description, piled high with books, magazines, coffee cups, wine bottles and God-knows-what else.

All this is by way of saying that I am by no means naturally tidy, nor clean, and that my approach to housekeeping is - um - relaxed, to say the least. Nor do I get much help from the DH in this, as he simply doesn't notice mess.

My biggest sin, though, was one committed by many of us - cluttering the windowsills. Which of us doesn't want more light in our rooms? Certainly not me. My house is old, with thick walls and tiny windows and every scrap of light is precious. Why, then, did I persist in putting pot plants and flower arrangements and candles and wotnot on my windowsills? I suppose I thought it added character. Well it doesn't.

As a first step to wabi-sabi, CLEAR your windowsills. Don't put anything there - not lamps, not ornaments, not candles (and matches and incense-stick holders...). It will take a couple of weeks to get used to how bare this looks, but once you get your eye in, it looks completely natural - you will benefit enormously from the light, and it also makes the windows much easier to both clean and open. Whatever you do from now on, don't block your windows. (For purists, this is in fact more of a Zen approach than Wabi-sabi, but we'll go into that another time.)

From your windows, progress outwards into the room. If there's one piece of furniture that you look OVER as you enter the room, this is the next important thing to keep clear. In my case, it's a green-painted sideboard to the left of the door as you enter the room.

In former days, this usually had three wooden bowls on it. I loved them, but somehow they always collected companions - unpaid bills, bank statements, letters to be posted, gloves, the dog lead. Now I work hard to keep that sideboard completely empty even if I don't have time for anything else. Gloves go in the drawers in the front of it. The dog lead's been given a hook by the door. If my husband dumps a bill or a letter on this sideboard, I immediately remove it to the dining table where it's less noticeable (the dining table remains a bit of a disaster area, as I do my beadwork on it, but nothing in life is perfect).

For many people, the coffee table is just a clutter magnet, so buying a table with two layers is a good move. The detritus that builds up on the top shelf can easily be cleared to the lower shelf each day and then you can deal with the whole mess later in the week. Be practical about this if housework isn't your idea of a good time. A glass top is all very well, but it shows every fingermark and you can still see all the rubbish underneath, whereas if you choose a natural wood finish that is not highly polished, or a white or grey distressed finish, you can hide a multitude of sins. We don't have a two-layer table, though I aspire to one, but we have one with two sliding sections, made by my husband's father, which enables us to hide the remotes, etc.

For surfaces against walls, such as sideboards, console tables or tallboys, you can afford to be less strict. These surfaces are usually not USED as such, but they are in your sightline as you enter a room, or as you sit on the soft furnishings. If you lack the discipline to keep these completely clear, try to limit your items to three in number - for instance a lamp, an ornament you really love, and a flower arrangement that reflects the season. That gives you a simple still-life that adds texture, colour and light to a room without overwhelming it.

In my own home, the clutter on the marble-top unit required the most thought. The problem was really lack of storage, and this was dealt with by the DH taking all our CDs and ripping them into I-Tunes, then discarding the ones that we never played (let's face it, with most albums you only really love a few tracks, not the whole thing). This freed up about a third of the space in the CD racks, leaving plenty of room for a 'refile' section into which I can quickly pop any loose CDs prior to refiling them properly.

Voila, clean surfaces that are easy to dust and wipe down without having to move anything - and that means they get cleaned more often.