The flowerpot man
ARTHUR PARKINSON CREATES FLAMBOYANT, FLORAL DISPLAYS WITH BIG CHARACTER – IN CONTAINERS. HE REFLECTS ON HOW HIS TINY COURTYARD PLOT IS HIS SANCTUARY, STUDIO AND SOLACE
Make your world alive. Even a window box has the power to unleash vitality for the greater good of your mind and of the planet, a nurturing of flora and fauna alike, creating visual and mental sanctuaries.
To be a gardener is to be an artist. You’re painting a living picture, one that continues to evolve and delight. There seems to be an abhorrent idea that beauty is something you can only aspire to and achieve in a grand house or in a large garden, but beauty doesn’t bow to this; it can be nurtured in the smallest space, and here it can be truly fabulous. Perhaps, best of all, is its potential to connect and support the natural world around us, a world that’s waiting to be given the vital help to thrive once more.
The garden is central to my life. It’s a daily therapy. Its seasonal highlights and growing calendar fill my head with the excitements and longings of its emerging and temporary beauty. I’m constantly thinking about the next season. This growing of flowers from spring to autumn is a changing, living ballet that adds mental vigour through the year. It requires months of planning, patience and constant care. You can never be truly head stuck if you immerse your mind in the needs of a garden.
I garden in pots because I don’t have a
choice. But I rarely resent this as it’s like having living vases of growing flower arrangements. You can fill pots easily, cramming them with colour and textures, creating islands of flamboyance. Good, big pots elevate the garden helpfully for a small space. This is wonderful as you get floral grandeur that’s uplifted to almost hip height immediately. Plants such as violas that you would otherwise have to get on your knees to properly study require just a light bow to admire. If you place large pots around seating, a tulip behind you can seemingly be perched on your shoulder like a parrot. Summer flowers can be literally in, around or above your face, towering and engulfing.
Pot gardening is fast and satisfying. The job of planting and replanting is quick, a sharp look for a whole season can be prepared within an afternoon. You can also treat a container garden like a changing stage, with the pots as props that can be moved around as you see fit. Compare this to having to maintain a constant expanse of earth that at times can be either a great mud slick or baked hard, requiring a good dose of backache to get it looking ship-shape.
Compost is the foundation of a container
garden. It’s vital that you nurture and understand it. Compost needs to be alive and rich, full of worms, moisture, air and fibre. Think of it as needing to look like a freshlybaked chocolate brownie and being like the topping of an apple crumble in texture.
Earthworms in pots signal that the soil’s
chemistry is good. Worms will appreciate annual applications of organic compost.
Leaf mould is rich in humus and easy to make yourself. Stuff leaves lightly into jute sacks in the autumn. Keep these moist in a corner and the leaves will rot down within a year. Unlike a black compost bin, these sacks will not look unsightly. Ash, beech, hornbeam and lime leaves all make good leaf mould. As these are popular street trees, leaf piles in the autumn will not be hard to find – just ignore the funny looks you may get while you gather them up!
Form a palette of your own favourite
colours; this will make your heart sing and your mind buzz. When putting mine together, I think of sun-ripened fruit bowl tones and of rich, antiqued Persian carpet tapestries. What
You can never be truly head stuck if you immerse your mind in the needs of a garden
I avoid are factory sweet colours as these are too brash and chemical, and white is totally banned, as are any milkshake pastels. These would ruin the carnival, samba dance bravado. This diversity of colour and shape forms an erupting coral reef. A bizarre yet gorgeous collective of Vivienne Westwood-like dresses, an outrageous Muppet rabble, zinging off one another’s presence from pot to pot.
A garden is a constant space of planning
and regrowth. Although labour intensive, it is massively nurturing to creativity. I always try a new variety of tulip, dahlia or annual and look forward to seeing if I like it or not. If I fall in love with it, fantastic, if I don’t, then not to worry as I can just take it out and try something else. After a few seasons of growing a garden like this you will create a sort of personal Noah’s Ark of seeds and bulbs that you really love and trust to create the feel and look that you want – the packets of seeds and bags of bulbs that you would take to a desert island.
You need repetition of similar colours and
shapes, with the occasional flare of something slightly bolder and different, but not something that commands attention stupidly away from everything else – combinations of flowers that are complementary but still exciting, with pop and zing but also flow. It’s important to maximise your space with the largest containers you can accommodate; small pots cannot give the root space plants need to grow to their full, door-engulfing potential.
The most important thing for all gardeners to do is to forgo the use of chemicals.
Herbicides and pesticides have somehow become cunningly embedded in many gardening tasks; the aisles of garden retailers are full of them. But thankfully attitudes are now changing – a few years ago you’d have been considered an over-sensitive hippy for shunning pesticides, now the science is telling us that such chemicals are not just bad for the insects, but for everything else on the planet, including us! If we as gardeners could work together to banish these chemicals, then we could do a huge amount for biodiversity.
A garden with fences covered in foliage will not only feel wonderfully engulfing but will be more accommodating to
visiting birds; the blackbirds certainly seem to feel happy in the back garden, a refuge from a hostile world, with more cats, more magpies and fewer hedges than ever. Town life, indeed any life, would be unbearable without waking up to the defiantly triumphant song of the male blackbird; in the summer, towards the longest day, they sing long into the evening. Heavenly. They’re particularly grateful for the soaked mealworms they are served in the morning; soaking transforms them from dried crisps into soft delicacies that a baby blackbird can easily swallow. These treats have to be hidden between pots so that they’re not scoffed by greedy wood pigeons, though.
There’s nothing more magical than seeing bees and butterflies visiting your flowers.
Even in a small space you should try to provide as much flower power as you can for pollinators through the spring, summer and autumn
The growing of flowers from spring to autumn is a changing, living ballet that adds mental vigour through the year
seasons. These vital insects give the garden a true sense of being alive; a window box can support them if the right flowers – rich in both pollen and nectar – are being grown in it. Think of the golden age of cottage garden plant tapestries having an abundance of flower faces, full of nectar, in sizes large and small, a bloom for every bee and butterfly. While native species of wildflowers are indeed excellent from the point of view of a bee or a butterfly, you honestly don’t need to turn your garden into a wildflower meadow for it to be a pollinator paradise. Garden flowers, if they’re single or semi-double varieties, are hugely valuable to pollinators, too.
Where we now live once had an uneven dirt surface of sandy gravel resembling
a dry riverbed. It formed great pools when it rained, creating a paradise for dabbling in Wellington boots for my younger brother and me. But the romantic farmyard surface of the yard is no more. It has been replaced with a smooth, uniform, health-and-safety-clipboardticked-off canvas of porous cubes. Safe and tamed, no more scuffed knees, no more puddles, dull, flat and human. And so it’s the garden that has been the saviour in what would otherwise have been an irreversibly changed place to live. It offers, right by the door, an exciting stamp of colour and vibrancy that, vitally, brings life. This in turn gives me hope, essential hope, within what is now an Earth being smothered by us, humanity. We may have forgotten what Eden is but through gardening this connection can be made strong again.
Taken from The Flower Yard: Growing Flamboyant Flowers in Containers by Arthur Parkinson (Kyle Books)
ABOUT ARTHUR
After training at Kew Gardens, Arthur went to work for Sarah Raven at her farm in East Sussex. He also created an acclaimed urban cut flower garden at the Emma Bridgewater factory in Stoke-on-Trent. Known as one of the UK’s young gardening stars, Arthur specialises in “creating islands of flamboyance” using only containers in his tiny but abundant plot – a five-metre pathway leading to the front door of his parents’ house (the back garden is his mum’s territory). His much-loved little flock of bantam hens live in his grandmother Min’s garden down the road. For more flamboyant flowers, follow him on Instagram: @arthurparkinson_.