Go a little bit potty in your garden ................................................

A carefully arranged group of pot plants is a beautiful feature that can transform any space. spoke with Sungrown Seedlings to learn the tricks of the trade.

Mit is worth investing in good quality pots – they’ll last a lifetime. Matching pots look great but you can also combine pots with a common theme ie all terracotta, baskets, blue and white. a group starts with three and can go up to around five or six but more than that and you can lose impact.

For a statement group of three you’ll need a tall plant in the back, a shorter but wide plant in the middle and a small plant in front.

Your group can be made up of small plants or large ones.

atching pots: Numbers: Size and Shape:

shades of green are the easiest to mix but of course you can combine variegated plants and ones with red or yellow leaves. It’s funny how indoor plants go

Colour: Which plants go in which pots:

in and out of fashion.

However, the most important thing is the health of your plants and that they are happy in the pots and position you choose for them.

So consider the needs of the plant first – are they suited to indoor or outdoor? How much sunlight do they need? What shape and size pot will best accommodate their root system?

A tall pot (say a metre high) is most suited to plants with long root systems whereas a round flatter pot is better for plants with shallow roots. Tall pots are great for trailing plants too.

Contact Sungrown Seedlings about their range of beautiful pots to suit indoor and outdoor spaces.

The government’s $25,000 Homebuilder stimulus package has got many thinking seriously about how they could maximise the long term benefit of this unexpected windfall. But how to get the very best out of it? It’s one thing to have such an enormous boost freely offered but how do you really make it work for you, in a way that keeps working? If it is really a once-ina-lifetime event, can you make it keep giving for the lifetime of your home? I’m sure there will be those who will simply go out and ‘burn’ it by getting something added to their house they want — a new fence, a nicer driveway, a fresher bathroom or upgraded kitchen.

Then there will be those who are about to build, and will just add another bathroom, office, bedroom, or grander entrance, just because they can. While all these things are good and could add instant value to your property, there’s an even bigger opportunity that could be whistling past. Don’t miss it! When it comes to making a home truly energy efficient and sustainable, you will enjoy the home comfort benefits of it immediately, but the cost of doing so means reaping the monetary reward takes a few years to catch up. There’s a time lag where an energy efficient house has to generate the savings to pay for the initial cost.

With this unexpected windfall — $25,000 — that time/cost lag can be completely eliminated. You can build a genuinely energy efficient home with all the comfy living benefits to enjoy immediately AND totally pocket all the savings at the same time.

There may be sustainability and efficiency aspects you would have loved to incorporate into a new home, but budget restraints prevent your ideal from coming to fruition. Perhaps not anymore. Is this an open door to your ideal home — not merely bigger or grander, but better, more efficient, cost-saving rather than always costing?

Knowing how to maximise the energy efficiencies now available can be a bit mindboggling for the uninitiated, but rest assured, we have our finger on the pulse all the time.

Start with a call to us today.

Look for this column in next month’s Style... we will continue digging deeper into what ‘sustainability’ means for your home.