A container garden offers countless opportunities for creativity in the landscape. You can enhance a house entryway with an elegant hanging basket and enliven a barren terrace with pots of greenery. You can screen an unattractive view and highlight a special landscape feature. Potted plants can hide a homely house foundation, soften the hard architecture of a balcony, and transform a blank wall into a kaleidoscope of color.
Containers can be great problem solvers, too. They make it possible to grow plants where the soil is poor, shallow, or dominated by large rocks. You can even grow plants where there is no soil at all, such as on paved walkways, patios, porches, and steps. If you have a sun-baked yard, you can tuck a few of your favorite shade-loving plants into pots set under a tree. Conversely, gardeners who contend with too much shade can give sun-seeking plants the conditions they need by moving potted specimens as the
light changes through the day. If wildlife likes to nibble your garden, you can protect plants that need to be pampered by putting them into containers and siting them close to the house.
Containers are ideal for impatient, restless, and experimental gardeners. With a few flowers and a few minutes, you can turn a basket or urn into an instant garden. If you like to change the look of your landscape with the seasons, containers make it easy to create different designs to suit your mood or the calendar. And when you're ready to push the limits of your talents with new plant combinations or temperamental specimens, container gardens are an inexpensive way to test your ideas on a small scale.
Color in Containers
Colorful container plants can serve as strong punctuation points in the garden, creating contrast and drama, or as a unifying element, drawing together separate spaces. For example, pots of red impatiens would bring striking spots of color to the beginning and end of a shady, ivy-lined path. Pots of pink petunias could be parked at an entry gate, around the front door, by a fountain, and throughout the landscape to become a repeating color theme.
Because containers offer such concentrated color, you may need to use a few tricks to tame rowdy combinations or give the eye a rest. For example, "neutral" plants, such as gray-leaved dusty miller and white-flowered sweet alyssum work wonders at turning down the heat of potted red geraniums. Foliage plants, such as hosta and vinca, offer welcome relief from a visual overdose of blooms. Conversely, you can sprinkle pots of white caladiums or pastel impatiens in quiet, shady places that need a boost or station a large urn of dramatically patterned coleus on a pedestal to color a bed of ferns.
Close-Up with Containers
When plants are kept close to outdoor activity areas, including patios, decks, and porches, it's easier to admire their colors and textures than it is when you grow the same plants farther away in a bed. This is especially true of flowering plants with intricate color patterns, such as impatiens with patterned petals or dark-veined balloon flowers, and it's also true of plants with striking foliage, such as bronze-leaved ornamental grasses or silvery leaved heucheras.
Because plants growing in containers located only a few steps from your door are so convenient to maintain, they present an excellent opportunity to grow showy varieties that need a little extra attention to maintain their good looks. Vigorous bedding geraniums famed for their huge clusters of double flowers, for example, need regular deadheading and fertilizing. When these and other showy plants are kept in containers on a patio or deck, the small amount of extra effort they require seems more like a privilege than a chore. Living close to containers also means that you can monitor them for emerging pest and disease problems easily and treat them before the pests can cause damage. In fact, container plants are often healthier than those growing in the open garden, because the sterile, free-draining soil used in pots reduces risk of disease, and elevated containers discourage invasion from many pests who prefer to stay close to the ground.
Mobile Beauties
Containers are invaluable when you must move beloved plants to a new home. Should you need to relocate plants, especially over a long distance, they will fare better if you can get them accustomed to life in pots several weeks before moving day. Afterward, they will wait patiently in their containers while you get settled and prepare a more permanent location for them.
But containers are most often used to provide a permanent home for a plant, which is especially good news for apartment and condominium dwellers whose gardening space is limited to a terrace or patio. Given proper care, even trees and shrubs can live happily in containers for many years.
If your yard is large enough to provide an out-of-the-way nursery area, you can shuffle pots so that each container can be moved to a place where it will be fully appreciated as it reaches its peak. Don't worry if that spot is shady, because sun-loving flowers, such as petunias, geraniums, and globe amaranth are often grateful for temporary shade when they have reached the blooming stage.
If your own mobility is limited, container gardens make it easy to enjoy plants. Pots and boxes can be raised to a convenient height, eliminating the need to bend or stoop, and they can be moved or arranged to accommodate the special needs of the gardener. And because container gardens are usually smaller in scale, they are less taxing to care for.
Pushing Hardiness
Containers offer the easiest way to grow bulbs, perennials, and even shrubs that are tender in your area. Instead of digging them up at the end of the season or watching them succumb to cold, simply move the entire pot to a sheltered spot, such as an unheated garage or storage area, or anywhere the plants will not be exposed to freezing temperatures. This maneuver works beautifully with caladiums, calla lilies, and carinas, and where winters are short, even vigorous petunias and geraniums can be maintained through winter this way.
When growing small, hardy shrubs in containers, sometimes careful placement of the pots is all that is needed to give those plants the edge they need to survive the frigid weather in good condition. Snuggle evergreen azaleas, camellias, and hydrangeas against a sunny wall, which will absorb the sun's warmth and protect them from wind, and they may well make it through the winter with no trouble, even if they are marginally hardy in your area.
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