Back to Basics: Design a Great Container

Whether you garden on a sprawling suburban lot or on a small urban balcony or patio, in full sun or in shade, you can design and plant a pot with stunning results. That’s the great thing about gardening—as long as you know a few basics, you can flex your artistic side even if you can’t draw a straight line.
First the basics. You’ll need a pot with drainage holes to shed excess water, otherwise the roots will rot and the plants will die. Buy a good, all-purpose potting mix—one with fertilizer granules mixed in to save time. Choose a container that complements the style of your home. For example, a classic iron urn looks great with a Victorian home, while a tall, contemporary glazed pot can enhance sleek architectural lines.

Create impact with color. Pick a pot in a color that enhances your garden, patio furniture or backdrop. Many garden centers carry new lightweight resin pots in a range of Crayola-like colors—red, blue, chartreuse, grey, or purple, for example—and in many sizes. Pots smaller than 14 inches across will require frequent watering, so the bigger pot you choose, the better. Last, determine where the pot will go and how much light that space receives during the summer, and select plants based on their light requirements (shade, part shade, sun).

Next comes the fun part—choosing the plants. I use the terms ‘monopot’ and ‘combopot’, says Ray Rogers in his new book, “The Encyclopedia of Container Plants: More than 500 Outstanding Choices for Gardeners.” (Timber Press, 344 pages, $34.95). A monopot contains one type of plant while a combopot includes two or more different plants. Garden designer Patti Kirkpatrick of Joliet plants several containers of monopots and combopots for her deck. A container filled with one type of coleus or an ornamental grass, such as Pennisetum ‘Prince’ (purple fountain grass), can give you a very dramatic and contemporary look, she says.

One easy formula for a mixed container planting is to use a thriller, filler and spiller, as shown here. The striking shade-loving caladiums are the thrillers, the tallest plants in the pot, which add visual interest with their coarse, colorful leaves. The fillers are the New Guinea impatiens with their rose-colored flowers and light yellow streaks down the center of the leaves. And the spiller is a variegated Plectranthus, ‘Troy’s Gold.’

What works well here: the plants offer leaves with contrasting shapes and textures—broad and pointy, oval, and long and slender. There’s a limited color palette—green, rose, white and golden-yellow. (Adding a few orange or pale blue flowers would surely take away from this put-together ensemble.) The container’s color and shape are neutral. And, perhaps most important, all of the plants prefer the same type of culture—light shade, good drainage and occasional watering with a liquid-soluble fertilizer.

Use the same formula to create a full-sun planter with some red fountain grass, dragonwing begonias and sweet potato vines—a thriller, spiller and filler. Or, for a contemporary look, plant a monopot using only begonias or petunias or calibrachoa. The possibilities are endless. On your next visit to the garden center, pick up a pot, some plants and start designing in your cart. Becoming a garden artist was never easier.

Walk this Way: Two Good Design Pointers

If you own a house, there’s a good chance you have a side yard.  And you pay taxes on that side yard because it’s part of your property. Even so, many homeowners figure the side yards are an afterthought.  In a crowded city, the side yard is likely to be quite narrow and shady.  In the bungalow where I grew up, the sides of the house were cloaked with hostas and a slim ribbon of cement walk that lead from the street pass the side entryway and to the alley.  

Stand across from any house with side yards and notice how they frame the building.  They are part of the curb appeal.  What’s planted there?  How do the owners access their back yard?  What are the focal points--what draws your eye first?  And second?  

In our ex-urban one-acre setting -- we’re not quite in suburbia and not quite in farm country -- our side yards are quite large and filled with shrub borders and flanked by lawn and steps, planting beds around the foundation and arbors on each side of the house. 

I like arbors because they provide a sensation of leading one through a doorway and into the next garden room.  All the better if the style and  material of the arbor honors the architecture of the house.  This incredible arbor-and-fence combination enhances the turn-of-the-century frame house. What a bore this side yard would be with no flowers, no arbor, no path, just lawn.  There’s be nothing to stop your gaze.

But here your eyes are drawn to the arbor and then the sweep of plantings, curving around and hugging the lawn to the front walk.  It’s a stunning scene even in winter when the plants are dormant. 

There’s something else here that works particularly well but you may not notice immediately.  It’s the color palette.  And a very English one at that with pinks, chartreuse (lady’s mantle flowers), blue salvia, catmint, silver-leaved lamb’s ears, variegated dogwood and white daisies.  It’s a limited pastel palette--no hot-lips' reds, oranges, or other warm tones.  Oftentimes when a perennial border or even a container combination is not quite right, it’s the color palette.  Stick with a triad of colors or a monotone combination of one color and you can’t go wrong.  

For more on effective color combinations, see Painting Your Garden with Plants classes, coming this spring to the Chicago Botanic Garden.   

What are your favorite colors in the garden?