Container gardens are another way to add outdoor interest to landscapes, and their popularity is growing. Busy gardeners find attractive containers an easy and minimal-maintenance way of creating displays of color for decks and patios.
Rules for creating container gardens are liberal. Home owners can use familiar bedding plants as well as more tropical foliage. Mixing plants often gives interesting combination’s of colorful flowers and unusual leaf textures.
A container garden with dwarf schefflera, red hot salvias and a colorful croton might be the ideal accent for your landscape. Or, how about a container of ready-to-harvest herbs near the kitchen or some decorative and upright papyrus or eugenia topiaries as accent features on the patio?
One way to reduce the frequency of garden chores is to pick plants adapted to the location. Our landscapes are nothing like the original habitats where the plants once grew. The soils have been disturbed, overhead cover removed and drainage patterns changed during construction. Gardeners have to select the best of the native and introduced species to survive in their home sites.
Gardeners also can reduce maintenance, yet keep an attractive landscape for the entire year by using more perennials and foliage plants. Some to consider are African iris, bush daisies, crotons, gingers, Joseph’s coat, milkweed, Mexican heather and spathiphyllum. They give an extended period of use without the seasonal change. Scheiber says the plantings can be more expensive initially, but gardeners should notice a reduced cost over time.
Sally
I’m sure it will look just wonderful when your plants mature and start to bloom (if you bought blooming ones). I like that with container gardening you can get creative with really interesting pots and containers if you want to. Really nice container are expensive so it might take some time to have a really nice looking collection, but when people do it’s amazing.
Don’t forget to maybe get some vines like clematis and either place a trellis in the pot or place the pot up against a wall or fence that you could hang a trellis on. Your small garden can grow upward with vines and it really looks quite nice. 🙂
Glad to hear that you enjoyed the article. 🙂
Interesting you should write about this, as I’ve just spend a couple of weeks building up my potted garden. I had a nice warm courtyard with no soil, which now has the beginnings of a garden, but all in pots. Very different from other ways of gardening, it need much more planning I found.