Plenty of Pots
I love pots! I can get as creative as I want. And this is the best way to add instant charm to a home or condo or an apartment or where ever you live. As you can see, I have everything from inexpensive clay pots to more expensive ceramic pots. There is a place for them all. I have pots of plants for shade and pots of plants for sun and pots of plants that get half and half. Most of my pots contain annuals but a few contain perennials. I have even used house plants in pots (these usually have to be added when the temps are warm enough). When your well thought out landscape plan ends up with a few blank areas, simply add a pot of flowers. Pots are movable so just put them where they make the biggest impact. Over the years some of the main things I have discovered with pots is to use bigger rather than smaller; they dry out too fast otherwise. Use the best potting soil you can find. I use a commercial mix from a local plant nursery. Make sure there is a drainage hole in the bottom; I cover mine with a small bit of screen or landscape fabric to keep pests out. I used to add stones or styrofoam peanuts but don’t find that is necessary unless you are filling a really big pot. I also like to add a slow release fertilizer with a systemic insecticide.
These are some examples of pots with perennial and annuals. Some have turned out very well, as in the first example. The golden creeping jenny used as a trailer in this pot grows well in the shade but doesn’t get it’s golden color unless grown in the sun. I love heucheras but so do snails, so using them in pots is great. The middle pot also did very well, although not as full as the first one. The location of this pot gave the hosta enough shade, and the petunia enough sun. The last example here did not do as well as I hoped; I have always wanted to grow lupines but was afraid they would not do well in our hot summer temps. And they didn’t. They bloomed for awhile but eventually succumbed. But with the addition of petunias,all was not lost; we did have some summer color.
As you have noticed in my previous posts, we have these pretty landscape lights in our front yard. One year, just for fun, we thought we would try them in pots of flowers. And, while the plantings turned out very well, adding the lights was less than successful, as you can see from the two photos here. The last photo is of one of my favorite ceramic pots planted with pentas, a dracena and Silver Falls Dichondra, a simple planting, but effective.
Here you see a charming ceramic pot of geraniums, pansies, violas and vinca minor. This was one of the spots our daughter’s traveling flamingo stopped on his way to Texas. While he was at our house, we would frequently find him near or even in the flowers! The middle pot has African daisies and light purple petunias, along with my favorite dichondra. Sometimes I have luck with African daisies and sometimes not. But I love them so much I can’t resist trying again. The last photo here shows an exuberant mix of potted flowers (the morning glories) and in-the-ground Bubblegum petunias, another one of my all time favorites plants. This was an accidental vignette but it was certainly eye catching!
This was a planting in a focal point that turned out very well indeed. The plant in the container is a white rose of sharon. It was sort of a leftover after we moved the bigger ones and my husband couldn’t bear to discard it. So we planted it here and added more African daisies with dichondra, and you can see by the center photo just how successful this combination in this spot was. After we planted the container, we staked and trimmed the rose of sharon to, we hope, form it into a small tree. Our grandkids were here for a weekend and we all had a good time painting rocks, as you can see in the last photo. A very cute fall addition. Although we probably won’t do it, I would be tempted to do a row of these pots next year—just for the “wow!” factor.
Final thought:
We do try, honestly we do!, to limit the number of pots we plant. But there is always some new annual or perennial that we need to try. And there’s no denying that containers of flowers bring so much joy—they are sunshine to the soul!