MAKE A WONDER WINDOWBOX
The inspirational With clever planting techniques and the right plants your display can last for three seasons
When I was running Chelsea Physic Garden in London I developed some useful techniques for keeping our display pots looking bright and vibrant yearround, without needing to totally replant. One starts with a large evergreen, such as box (buxus), plunged into a display pot with space around the edge to fill with seasonal bedding. It worked well and continues to do so in my own garden, but the principle can be tweaked and applied to windowboxes, giving them three seasons of display... here’s how. Prepare your windowbox in the usual way, with some drainage material at the bo om and a good peat-free compost with slow-release feed on top. Select small, evergreen shrubs to fill the back half of the windowbox. Shrubs that work well here and hold good colour include hebe ‘Heartbreaker’, with its vibrant pink leaves, euonymus ‘Emerald ‘n’ Gold’ with its erm... emerald and gold foliage, or Senecio candicans. This plant is actually an evergreen perennial but may as well be a shrub. It has intense paddle-shaped, silver-white leaves which hold year-round. Once you’ve chosen your shrubs (say two specimens of one species), pick some evergreen grasses to fill the remainder of the back of the windowbox. The hebe looks good with the burgundy evergreen grass Uncinia rubra, whereas the euonymus is fla ered by carex ‘Evergold’. Or, for a really dramatic look, combine the silver senecio with the black grass Ophiopogen planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’.
Now comes the clever bit. Plunge four or five (more if it’s a long box) empty 9cm (3½in) pots into the compost at the front of the windowbox. Se le them in so their rims are just above the soil surface. These are now your ‘containers’ for different plants which can be slo ed in between now and next summer. The first ‘slot-in’ plants to cover the autumn season are either po ed heathers or universal pansies. Simply pop the planted pot into the plunged pot and feed or water as usual. When the pansies have their low point in February just remove them and slot in pots of snowdrops or Iris reticulata. These will keep the colour up until March, when you can slot in the third batch of plants – maybe violas, creeping campanulas or an alpine, such as saxifraga, which will carry the colour until late spring.