Pots of gold
Dazzle outdoors with containers
GET creative, add colour and increase your options with container gardening.
For maximum enjoyment, surround patio chairs with perfumed plants. Try the smoky scent of lavender to balance the heavy aroma of lilies.
Add in some Nicotiana sylvestris, or flowering tobacco, then Tagetes lemmonii, which has peppery flowers and foliage that smells like mint and lemon.
When choosing plants for a container, pick ones that like the same conditions.
Never mix sun lovers and shade lovers or those with different soil or watering requirements. Do you homework and check plant labels.
Pots offer opportunities you would not have in ordinary garden soil, allowing no-fuss drought-busters such as ornamental grasses, desert cacti and agaves or ericaceous plants like camellias to be grown.
A watertight container is also an ideal home for miniature water lily, water hyacinth and arrowhead.
Containers can create different moods, too. Try bamboo and acers in glazed pots for an instant oriental feel.
Or achieve a seaside theme by gluing shells and thick rope around painted planters. Maritime flowers such as Erigeron glaucus, broom, hypericum, sea holly, cistus, rosemary, Spanish gorse, flax, thyme and mesembryanthemums, are all easy-going.
Link things together with some recurring colour, material or shape.
Front gardens and town garden designs are often formal and rely on symmetry, based around parallel lines and right angles. Let displays echo that by pairing or making repeat patterns of standard fuchsias or topiary box.
Use vertical surfaces, too. Wall-mounted pots are ideal for plants that trail, such as verbena, diascia and Convolvulus sabatius. A shelf unit can shelter small plants and troughs can be fixed to windowsills. Containers can also hide eyesores. Cram cascading climbers and trailers into pots around drainpipes.