Over the fence

Should we abandon hanging baskets, or are they a solution for space-starved city dwellers?

Are hanging baskets a wasteful way to garden?

A brief display in summer, then dried remains all winter I love it when the council spruces up the baskets

I’ve never really understood the idea of hanging baskets. You get a container with holes, line it to retain moisture, then hang it up to dry. You water it at least daily in summer, feed it to keep it blooming, and replant it twice a year to maintain the effect. Or you enjoy a brief display in summer, then leave it full of dried remains all winter until the next season. I understand the idea is to bring life to dull walls, and gain interest and colour at eye level, but the effect is limited by the size of the basket. How about a well- chosen climber or wall shrub? Choose a climber such as the evergreen trachelospermum, or an abutilon, which flowers for months, and you will achieve enduring interest from the ground up, rather than just a splash at eye level. In shady situations, large-leaved, variegated ivy does an amazing job, or how about an upright camellia, which will give you weeks of exotic blooms in early spring and evergreen foliage for the rest of the year. Choosing one bold subject has far more impact than the bitty, fragmented look of a basket of mixed bedding. If planting in the ground isn’t possible, most shrubs and climbers can be grown in pots. Use large containers that hold plenty of loam-based compost and your plants will be happy for years with an annual application of slowrelease fertiliser. They’ll need watering, but not as frequently as hanging baskets and it’s an easier task to water a pot at ground level than something halfway up a wall. Hanging baskets are a way of growing plants where space is limited. However, if city dwellers are starved of space they are usually starved of time, too, and hanging baskets use up quite a bit of that.

It’s easy to think that the changing seasons can’t be noticed in a city, that new buds or shedding leaves are blocked out by concrete. But these things can be found if you know where to look and a little urban greening goes a long way. I love it when my council spruces up the hanging baskets in late spring. They bring welcome colour and, as the weeks go on, petunias, geraniums and begonias bloom and spread, giving thousands of people a reason to look away from their phone screens for a while. Hanging baskets are not, some will argue, the most efficient way of gardening. They will always be a temporary home for plants that have only to exist and look pretty for a few months. They demand watering and food and, at the end of summer, they’ll be gone for another year. Urban and container gardeners are constant ly aware of the potent ial inefficiencies of their lot. It’s difficult to avoid waste when you can’t take soil for g ranted and have l imited space – when, as in my case, your dining table doubles up as potting shed. But that doesn’t mean new, more sustainable ways of urban gardening shouldn’t be deployed by councils. The Athenaeum Hotel’s living wall in London’s Piccadilly, has brought biodiversity to the city in a beautiful way, while the Grow Wild campaign has seen communities sow wildf lowers in shared spaces across the UK. But that doesn’t mean we should turn our backs on baskets. Colour in the city should come in all forms, from the rogue perennial sweet pea in a concrete front yard I cycle past regularly, to the council’s valiant basket efforts. None of it is a waste.