Small- space gardening takes off
Small- space gardening offers endless esthetic options, writes Jennifer Barger.
Like many gardeners, Miriam Settles oversees a lush space full of herbs, vegetables and flowers, but all of her plants are in containers, on the wooden deck of her Northern Virginia townhouse.
“Small- space gardening is taking off in urban areas, both due to a lack of square footage and people’s busy schedules,” says Settles. “Smaller gardens mean less time watering and fewer pests chomping on your plants,” Settles says.
THE CONTAINER DECK GARDEN:
On summer evenings, the salsa Miriam and Greg Settles serve atop grilled fish, tastes farmersmarket fresh because Miriam grows her own herbs and tomatoes on their deck. “Last year was my best year ever for Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes — we easily grew hundreds of them,” says Settles, who has been tending her containers- only garden since 2002, babying heirloom roses, strawberry plants and annual and perennial flowers. “Anything you can plant in the ground, you can plant in a pot: broccoli, fruit, veggies.”
Settles, who works in communications for the U. S. federal government, began blogging in 2008, doling out gardening advice while posting photos of her successes, occasional failures ( ornamental grasses that craved less sun) and wild visitors. “We get bees, goldfinches and toads,” she says. “And there are hummingbirds who love to stick their beaks into flowers. I try to get them trumpet- shaped blooms.”
Settles is also resolutely against pesticides. “Once the garden is in, I don’t fiddle with it.”
Settles orders some specimens, including roses, online.
Settles’ dozens of containers — purple snapdragons in a blue ceramic pot, thyme and cilantro in a repurposed wooden wine box — are stacked on risers fashioned from other pots and bricks. This makes the deck feel layered and it helps her pots drain.
“I don’t have to pull weeds, either. We just love to sit out there. It’s so peaceful.”
THE PATIO FAIRY GARDEN:
Stone pots filled with ferns and boxwoods line the front stoop of Anna Fuhrman and Joe Kerr’s Georgetown home, offering a verdant hint of what lies beyond the door. Step inside the renovated 1830s wooden townhouse, and it’s apparent that inveterate propagators live here. There are air plants stashed under glass cloches, wee succulents crowding the pot rack in the kitchen and, beyond expansive French doors, a narrow backyard oasis of hydrangeas, grasses and Japanese maples.
“I wanted it to look like a fairy garden, a place where my daughter, Lucy, and I can play makebelieve,” says Fuhrman. The patio adjoins a skinny flagstone path flanked by long, rectangular beds.
The plants and flowers thriving in the beds and mismatched pots, come across like an English garden on steroids. Tall, spiky, red pincushion flowers keep company with chartreuse creeping Jenny and butterfly bushes, their purple flowers swarming with bees.
“I make sure there’s colour happening all the time,” says Fuhrman.
At the far end of the angled path is a tin shack as old as the house that Kerr restored with long beams and sliding barn doors. “It’s both a potting shed and an entertaining space,” he says. The small structure holds extendable tables Kerr crafted from wood and plumbing parts; in warm months, the family sets them up on the path and hosts Midsummer Night’s Dreamy dinner parties.
THE NEW- ORLEANS- STYLE BALCONY GARDEN:
From the balcony of their fourth- floor D. C. apartment, Brad Schou and Barron Womble enjoy picture- perfect views of Washington’s Meridian Hill Park, with its towering trees and high Italianate walls. But the couple’s own garden — a New Orleans- style fantasia planted on ( and cascading from) their terrace — also invites people to stop and stare.
Thanks to a complex plan of topiaries and plant “walls” facing the street, the couple put on a brilliant show from May through frost. Each spring, they plan out a curtain of ivy, sweet potato vines, wave petunias and other plants that grow to cover their balcony railing. “We use bright, vibrant colours so people can see it from a distance,” says Schou, a commercial property manager.
The balcony display is powered by six plant walls — imagine a variation on shoe bags you hang over closet doors. Their pockets are stuffed with soil, then flowers or vines. “It’s like a grid, and it helps with the capacity to design,” says Womble, who uses Florafelt vertical garden planters made from recycled fibres that are nearly indestructible. Womble accents the design with ball topiaries that might be begonias, petunias or impatiens. “It’s about creating a green environment for us to relax in,” says Womble, who works at a law firm. “Passersby see the garden, and we get privacy.”
The pair waters via a barrel on the balcony that is filled from a hose connected to the kitchen sink. A pump pushes water to the wall and topiaries through irrigation tubes and emitters. Four water features, including two tiled mosaic wall fountains, gently burble, masking the noise of the traffic below.
“We met in New Orleans, and there are so many great balconies there,” says Schou.
Small- space gardening is taking off in urban areas, both due to a lack of square footage and people’s busy schedules.