Autumn GLORY
If your summer display is fading fast, don’t despair. It’s easy to perk up pots even if you can’t spare much time, says Alan
As summer gives way to autumn, tubs and hanging baskets start to look decidedly end of season, particularly if they have been neglected over the holidays.
A good feed, regular watering and a thorough deadheading will put your geraniums, fuchsias and petunias back in flowering mood. But there isn’t time for new buds to plump up and open before they’re clobbered by the deteriorating weather.
So make a brave decision. Ditch ’em now and start all over again with a new late-season look.
Instant show
You could choose a temporary display. A lot of people use smart patio tubs and troughs as decorative outer covers for a succession of potted plants that are displayed while they look their best and then replaced.
There’s a lot to be said for this approach when you are busy and want to keep special displays by the front door at all times. It’s the way to use those showy pot chrysanthemums that a lot of garden centres sell around now. Buy one or two, stand them in a sheltered spot where you can see them, and they’ll keep going for a couple of months until it’s time to replace them with a midwinter arrangement of evergreens, heathers and berrying shrubs.
It’s then very easy, from February, to arrange new pick ’n’ mix displays with pots of primroses, bulbs and polyanthus and swapping them for other early flowers as they come along.
By mid-may you can start again with your geraniums and fuchsias and hardly get your hands dirty.
Winter wonders
If you’re a more active grower, tip out your summer displays, clean up the containers, fill them with fresh potting compost and plant some autumn and winter bedding.
Winter-flowering pansies are firm favourites. They start flowering almost immediately, with bags more colour to come over the next seven or eight months. even if the weather turns very nasty they are usually quite philosophical about it and merely stop flowering for a few weeks until things improve.
Winter pansies are amazing value and – the trade won’t
thank me for telling you this
– if you trim the plants back when they start to look scruffy in late spring, they’ll flower all next summer, too.
A tub of pansies looks quite glamorous but you can team it with another autumn favourite, ornamental cabbage, for foliage interest. These come in sea-green, variegated with pale pinky-mauve, a deeper purple or cream markings.
By February or March, the coloured cabbages will be way past their best and losing their leaves, bolting or starting to rot – so they’ll want pulling out around then. I’d grow the two in separate tubs so you can sling the cabbages when they’re past it and leave the pansies undisturbed.
Permanent planting
The third choice is an easy option that’s proving
increasingly popular among people who are too busy to replant pots every season
– an all-year-round planting scheme of dwarf evergreens.
This won’t be as colourful as a floral display, but it’s a lot less work and the same planting scheme will last for several years.
Plants need choosing carefully so they don’t outgrow their containers too quickly.
You could have a single large specimen in a tub
– go for something fairly dramatic and architectural such as a trained topiary specimen – or pick a mixture of smaller plants that go well together in a wide, shallow container or trough.
Look out for plants that contrast attractively, too, or try a collection of little evergreen grasses, carex sedges or hardy ferns.