Let your garden go to pot
The effective use of containers can enhance borders, colour, esthetics
Mary, Mary, quite contrary. How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockleshells, perhaps in potted plants all in a row.
The art of potscaping — arranging potted plants in attractive clusters — isn't new. But it can be a forgotten tool in the gardener's arsenal.
It can come in handy, for instance, if you need to fill a gap in your garden border or if you want to frame something like a door for a focal point. Potscaping can also be a way to grow plants you can't grow in your soil.
“Garden planters are very useful for plants that need acid soil, such as rhododendrons, azaleas, skimmias, camellias and blue hydrangeas,” writes garden blogger Alexandra Campbell on her site The Middle-sized Garden. “It really is quite difficult to change the ph of your soil to grow these plants if they don't grow well for you. Pots are the answer.”
Esthetically, the containers can add colour and interest to a space even if winters prohibit anything from actually growing in them. And the technique, also called “containerscaping,” works for indoor and outdoor gardeners alike.
Here are some tips for potscaping like a pro.
Embrace variety. Matthew Blashaw, who has hosted HGTV shows like Professional Grade, says his wife excels at this. “She creates these pot clusters, these groupings of large pots — different sizes, different colours, medium to small — right in the corner (of the yard),” he told Apartment Therapy. The effect is eye-catching and multi-levelled.
Stick to a theme. Campbell writes about a yard she photographed that featured pots grouped by colour. “The terracotta pots are at one side of the potscape and the galvanized zinc on the other, with a few black plastic pots concealed in the general prettiness,” she writes.
A unifying element can help. George Weigel, a garden writer for the Patriot-news in Harrisburg, Pa., suggests making things cohesive with one particular plant or pot style.
“Another way to tie the grouping together in a `landscapey' way is by picking a plant theme colour and repeating it in all three pots,” he writes. “You could go with shades of red, for example, using a range of flowers from pale pink to medium pink to rose to rosy-red.”
Find safety in numbers. Your arrangement can be affected by how many pots you choose to put in it. “Keep in mind that odd numbers tend to look more natural than even numbers (five or seven pots instead of four or six), and that your layout should keep the bigger pots and plants toward the back of the prevailing view,” Weigel writes.