Nick Bailey reveals easy design tricks to make the most of your potted displays
Bring back the feel of summer by trying a few of my design tricks
As the days shorten I always feel compelled to create colourful potted plant displays closer to the house. It’s my way of kidding myself that summer’s still here and it somehow mitigates the muted tones in the rest of the garden. Livening up your patio or porch in this way is as simple as planting up and grouping portable containers, but to make these displays really sing there are a few design tricks worth trying out.
Combining containers
Instead of planted pots being dotted around the place, bring them together in groups for bigger impact. Containers of the same size and style often work best placed out in rows but mixed pot shapes and sizes offer a greater opportunity for experiment. One of the best ‘pot compositions’ is borrowed from the Japanese principle of grouping rocks. To apply this to containers, try a trio of pots composed of a short wide bowl, a tall pot and a pot half way between the two sizes. It feels well balanced and easy on the eye. For a bigger grouping, try a cluster of six, with the five smallest pots sweeping around the largest, in ascending steps, like Russian dolls! Larger groups of seven or more pots can be composed in the same way or in two or three rows with, of course, the tallest at the back and the shortest at the front. The permutations are limitless.
Unifying pots
If your pots are a mix of styles and shapes that don’t necessarily look good clustered together there are a few simple ways to unify them. Painting can be fast and fun. Ordinary emulsion will hold on terracotta, timber and concrete pots for five years or more, whereas glazed ceramic pots need tile paint. I’m not suggesting painting all your pots but rather adding details to a few. Say, for example, you have a couple of blue glazed, Chinese pots, why not paint the rim of three terracotta containers the same blue? This simple trick helps all five pots become part of the same family and sit well together. Stencils are fun to try here, too. Or, for a quick fix, wrap your pots in loose-weave hessian tied up with garden twine – it has a shabby-chic look and is the cheapest and fastest ‘makeover’ you can do.
Simply place two large squares of hessian on top of one another to create an eightpointed star. Then sit the pot in the middle. The hessian can either be tucked into the soil at the top of the pot or tied with strands of twine just below the rim. Another simple unifying trick is to plant pre-grown trailing species such as Hedera helix around the edge of every pot. However you choose to do it, unity is key.