Floral JUNGLE
YOU DON’T NEED A HUGE GARDEN TO BASK IN THE BEAUTY OF BLOOMS. ARTHUR PARKINSON REVEALS THE POWER OF POTS, PARTICULARLY IN URBAN SPACES
Growing flowers is an ever-changing, living ballet that adds mental vigour through the year. It requires months of planning, patience and constant care. The garden is central to my life; it is a daily therapy. Its seasonal highlights and growing calendar fill my head with the excitements and longings of its emerging and temporary beauty. This is not a low-maintenance garden but deliberately a time-requiring, orchestrated, beautiful, admittedly expensive obsession and addiction. I like the challenge of growing a floral jungle in containers to block out the rawness of urban living.
Plants can be nurtured in the smallest space. Even a window box has the power to unleash vitality for your mind and the planet, creating visual and mental sanctuaries. Perhaps, best of all, is its potential to connect and support the natural world around us.
Gardening in pots has other advantages – it allows a garden to move. We may not be able to put down roots as readily as plants do, but containers mean anyone can grow a garden that can move with them.
Getting started
The pots are the largest investment in my garden, but I didn’t buy them all at once. They came in dribs and drabs; my mum already had a few dolly tubs, relics from old, now built-on, allotments.
Over the years, more have been added until avenues and clusters of them have formed completely, creating rows of contained flower beds. When I’m looking for a new large dolly tub or old bin, I’ll search all the online marketplaces I can think of, as these are often the best places to find them at good prices.
Perfect path
Hard landscaping is the biggest expense in a garden. Large pots can help avoid too much of this, but the herringbone brick of my garden is a saviour, a beautiful canvas to everything, so hard garden surfaces are worth getting right. Reclaimed old terraced brick is classy, as are old slabs, but avoid the visual curse of new-build brick, gravel or wood chippings.
Red brick is a good choice but blue engineering bricks are by far the best for weather resistance; they’re designed to be used underground, so won’t chip, but this will reflect in their price. The cheapest pathway is probably coddling, which would create an ‘ancient Rome’ feel – they have this underfoot in the garden restaurant at Petersham Nurseries in Richmond and I really like it.
The joy of terracotta
When people think of pots, they usually think of terracotta. If you have your heart set on this, you need to buy pots that have a frost-proof guarantee. Terracotta is porous, so in winter, when temperatures fall below zero, it can crack. Placing pots near to the walls of a house in winter, away from frost pockets, protects them. Raising them off the floor using pot feet is good protection, too, as it ensures air circulation under the bases and improves drainage.
With newly bought terracotta pots, the best way to age them is to dunk them in a pond or in a water butt, then a coat of algae will grow quickly on them. Even a bucket can be filled up with rainwater – it must be rainwater for the algae spores to be present. I have an upside-down dustbin lid propped up on bricks on the floor of the yard that we use as a bird bath, and trios of terracotta pots take turns soaking in this, while providing little bathhouses to the precious town frogs. The water is emptied and refreshed weekly so that it does not harbour mosquitoes, and birds and bees also visit it to drink. After a month of being submerged, they will start to slime up and, once dried, will look marvellous.
Terracotta pots can also be painted generously with organic natural yogurt in the summer, which will then go green. For the algae to take, the pots need to be kept damp and away from full sun for a few weeks so that the spores can really get growing. When planting them up for summer, line their insides with old compost bags, as this will help them to stay cool and reduce moisture loss.
Statement containers
Galvanised baths, dolly tubs or old metal bins make great containers. Dolly tubs are barrel-shaped, ribbed-sided old dears that were the original washing machines used by almost every household in the 19th century. What I love about them is their shape and they accommodate everything that I want to grow in a garden well and comfortably. The downside is that they now carry a price tag that reflects their antiquity.
Much cheaper and just as helpful are big galvanised dustbins. Try to buy them secondhand so that they’re already roughed up and weathered down. The old thick metal ones that were once used as actual dustbins are the best; they’re made of proper galvanised metal, with thick handles.
Old cattle troughs are also wonderful as they will fill whole corners of terraces and gardens like great beached whales. Seek out local farmers who will usually be willing to sell you old and leaking troughs that are already nicely weathered and bashed about.
Oval tin baths are lovely things, too. They look especially nice in rows sat on a terrace or on the edges of a raised bed. You’ll find decent-sized ones in good condition for between £40 and £50; I hate making holes in them as I just imagine them being filled up and used as duck baths.
The right soil
Soil is vital for plants’ vigorous growth. Ensuring healthy soil in pots is not only beneficial for plants but it is better for us, too, as it will result in not just a nicer visual display but one that requires less watering and feeding. Healthy soil holds nutrients for longer because it is a living substance.
When I started, I gave little thought to compost. I’d delight at the price and convenience of huge multipurpose bags that could fill a dolly tub in moments. Like most things that are cheap, there is a hidden ethical cost, and bargain compost is no exception. Carbon-storing peat bogs of Europe that have existed for millennia have been excavated for compost, and while there’s industry effort to curb its use, multipurpose high-street bags contain as much as 70% peat.
No compost from pots is thrown away in my garden, it’s spread around the garden through the pots again and again, but it is constantly added to and enriched. My pots are emptied in the autumn and at the end of spring – completely in the case of the tin baths and by half in the case of bins and dolly tubs. It is forked through and fluffed up to aerate it and encourage worms. I’ll add a mixture of things to liven it up, before placing drainage material back into the bottom of the pot and putting back the refreshed soil.
One of the best things to add is chicken manure pellets, which aid nutrients and can feed plants for months. Even better is well-rotted compost. If you can’t make it yourself, ask a neighbour or allotment plot holder if they can share some. Look out for Dalefoot Wool Compost, a peat-free, organic blend using the by-product of shorn sheep wool – this is excellent stuff!