Container Gardening

Containers...pots, planters, urns...

Container gardening adds to your ability to bring plants and color up from the ground right in your sight lines. You can start container gardening while you enjoy the bulbs you planted in the garden last Fall. We usually plant forced bulbs, pansies, osteospurnum and ivy well before the bulbs are up and open in our garden.
We have about 14 different sized containers around the yard this year. There is an urn by the front door planted with small orange fuschia, orange non-stop begonia and lime colored licorice vine. The porch also holds an old metal balcony stand planter with two pots of bird nest fern underplanted with wire vine as ground cover. Beside the front step in a square planter is a red rubber plant with potatoe vine and lobelia around the bottom. The other side of the step has a round urn with a fuschia standard, merango ivy and dark purple coleus. A small pot on the porch holds sambac jasmine and purple leaf coleus. Ivy also pours out of a wall sconce mounted on the porch's pillar. Almost all of these containers hold pansies or forced bulbs early in the spring which are then transplanted elsewhere or composted to make way for summer plants and flowers.
As the weather improves more tropical varieties make their way into the yard. The orange tree travels from the green house to the deck; this year we let purple star fill in as ground cover. The formium made it's home by the gate this year, with light blue lobelia setting off the grey green leaves nicely in the shady corner.
A garden urn sits to one side of the deck steps and holds a blue plumbago "teepee" with purple scaevola and cherry red super bells. Red and pink mandevilla trellises cover the two front corners of the dining shelter on the deck with lime green ipomea, light blue lobelia and red-purple verbena spilling out the bottom. A stand-alone pot of Hawaiian golden bamboo sits in front of the patio window and gives the view a decidedly tropical feel!
Other containers scattered around the patio and deck include an ornamental red pineapple, heliotrope, dipladenia, licorice vine, plumeria, cordeline red star spike, bromeliads and lantana, either as stand-alones or in mixed plantings.