Container garden
Care for your garden
Active gardeners sometimes accumulate outdoor plants in containers. These might be recent purchases not yet been installed in the garden, favored plants to enjoy close by, or plants that need regular attention.
Such accumulations sometimes clutter the patio, deck, balcony or corner of the garden without an identifiable purpose or plan.
Let’s assume that you are such a gardener, and you have—or could develop—a collection of outdoor plants in five or more containers, and you have space for this real or imagined collection.
Given these assumptions, you are ready to create a container garden, which is a designed display of selected plants, with potential for relatively low effort (compared to conventional gardening), low cost and high satisfaction.
Here are ideas for developing such a collection into a successful container garden.
Begin by deciding where you would want an attractive display of plants in containers. This site should be well-placed for the traditional priorities of ornamental gardening: pleasing the gardener and impressing garden visitors.
Then, check to ensure that this location has easy access for routine care of plants, including irrigation, fertilizing, pruning, repotting as may be needed, etc.
Exposure is another important consideration. A container garden can be developed under various degrees of full sun, bright shade, partial shade, or full shade. A desired site for a container garden could have a single exposure, or varying exposures during the day. Full knowledge of the site’s exposure guides the selection of plants.
Armed with this information, you are ready to select plants. For example, if your existing accumulation consists of sun-loving plants, and your desire location offers only partial shade, you will need to collect other plants.
This is an important checkpoint at which you determine that you have identified a desirable location with known exposure and five or more plants that will grow well in that situation.
Plant selection should be based on a theme of your own choosing. Your container garden could include plants of a selected genus, a preferred color or color combination, contrasting textures or forms or sizes, etc. The goal to avoid a struggling with an incoherent hodgepodge. Labeling a mishmash as “eclectic” doesn’t improve its message.
Hydrozoning is another consideration. This term refers to plants that have compatible needs for moisture. If your container garden consists of plants with about the same watering needs, their care will be easier than a group of plants that have various needs.
One approach to plant selection for a container garden is to specialize in succulent plants. This category of plants offers a wide range of colors, textures and sizes, and, importantly, low requirements for cultivation and maintenance. They do grow best with regular irrigation and light fertilization, but they can manage on their own when the gardener is occasionally neglectful.
The next design issue is the selection of containers. Let us begin by excluding black plastic nursery cans. They have their utility, to be sure, but a container garden is intended to be an attractive display, and attractive containers are essential.
The containers in a container garden can be of various sizes to accommodate individual plants, but they should be compatible in appearance. The easy choice is low-fire terra cotta, which is widely available and inexpensive, and good for the Monterey Bay area’s moderate climate. High-fire earthenware has significant advantages but is more durable and expensive. Glazed pots have their own good points and are also more expensive than basic terra cotta.
If you prefer to use containers of the same, analogous, or contrasting colors, the unit cost likely will be greater than for low-fire terra cotta but could be acceptable as an asset to the container garden. In any event, carefully used containers have a long period of utility, so their initial cost should be regarded as an investment.
The arrangement of containers contributes greatly to the overall effectiveness of the container garden. For a grouping of five or more containers, the important variables are the relative heights of each container and the mature height of each plant.
Most likely, both the containers and the plants will vary in size. This reality calls for three-dimensional design. In other words, the designer of the container garden should exercise creative control over the height of each component of the container garden.
At the outset, the container garden should be elevated at least slightly above ground level. This improves visibility and importance of the display and minimizes any potential obstruction of drainage through the bottom of the containers. This elevation could be provided with a platform of boards on bricks or blocks. A minimum arrangement could be established with just one level of bricks under the boards. A more elaborate plan might include a secondary platform supported by two or more levels of bricks.
From an aesthetic perspective, varying the heights of the container garden optimizes the visibility of each plant and ultimately provides a more pleasing look. This can be achieved by selectively raising individual containers with bricks, blocks, or inverted black plastic nursery cans of the needed sizes. This approach involves raising complementary plants to appropriate juxtapositions and placing lowgrowing specimens to hide the plant supports.
This fine-tuning process could require thoughtful study of the display, with a beverage of individual choice in hand.
Advance our gardening knowledge
Developing a container garden requires, as always, knowing your plants’ cultivation requirements, including exposure, irrigation and fertilization. This information can be found on the internet, or ideally on plant labels.
If your container garden is shaded and you want succulent plants, the exposure needs of these plants is available from on https://debraleebaldwin. com/types-of-succulents/ shade_succulents/. This resource of course doesn’t cover the complete range of succulents plant but it provides a helpful beginning.
Enrich your gardening days
Designing and creating a container garden can be creative challenge, a relatively low-cost, low-effort activity, and overall a rewarding experience. It might not provide as much physical exercise as conventional gardening, but that could be a good thing.
As I build this column, I am quite aware of our chaotic socio-political environment, but content to focus for the moment on the natural world of gardening. I hope you share that preference.
Keep your emotions positive and your viruses negative and enjoy your garden.
Tom Karwin is past president of Friends of the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, Monterey Bay Area Cactus & Succulent Society, and Monterey Bay Iris Society, and a Lifetime UC Master Gardener (Certified 19992009). He is now a board member and garden coach for the Santa Cruz Hostel Society. To view daily photos from his garden, https://www.facebook. com/ongardeningcom566511763375123/. To search an archive of previous On Gardening columns, visit http:// ongardening.com.