Container Gardening From
Gardening Wisdom



I won the best writing of the year award from the Garden Writers Association a few years ago with my book Gardening Wisdom.  It's a compilation of gardening tips and tricks from my collection of old gardening books.  I loved writing it and I want to share a small bit of the container gardening chapter with you.  I hope you enjoy this too.

Doug




Any plant can be successfully grown in a container.  In our gardens, I grow a wide range of roses, herbaceous perennials, alpines, water garden plants, evergreens and yes, even annuals in containers.  My garden would be the poorer if it were constrained to the traditional "annual in a bucket" look.

I also believe that gardeners who restrict their plant choice to those plants advocated by the horticultural industry as "container plants" cheapen their own gardening experience.  To me, one part of gardening is learning to be adventurous, to be bold with the use of plants in the garden.  To grow the plant you like in the place you want to enjoy it is the ultimate plant growing experience.  Growing in containers allows a gardener to enjoy any plant in almost any location.

"Probably no other occupation or amusement is more innocent in itself, or more devoid of injury or annoyance to others, than the cultivation of flowers."

Heinrich  The Window Flower Garden



Because any plant can be grown in a container, this book will not list appropriate plants for container growing.  Instead, the author will simply suggest that if the plant is alive and the reader enjoys the plant - for flower, leaf or fruit - then it is a suitable candidate for container growing.

There are four primary factors to be considered when growing container plants: the container itself, the appropriate soil for the plant, feeding the plant and providing adequate water.  Each of these factors is considered below.

"Several people have written to ask me what to do about their sink-gardens during the winter. I couldn't care more."

Vita Sackville West More For Your Garden.


"Where the architecture of a house is dull and featureless, or the surroundings leave much to be desired, the use of window boxes not only brings cheer to the rooms behind, but imparts an air of gaiety to the whole street."

Frances Perry  Woman Gardener,


Containers

The choice of container is as important in the garden as the choice of plant to fill it as it is this initial choice that sets the tone for the rest of the garden adventure.  A pair of old rubber boots can indeed by used to hold geraniums and petunias but this choice of container sends an entirely different design message than using a hot-fired Italian clay pot filled with the same plants.

The first time a tipped-over barrel is filled with flowers to make it appear as if the flowers were spilling out over the lawn, it is cute. An entire street of such barrels resembles a gaudy theme park more than a gardening neighborhood.  The easiest way to decide about personal style is to spend a winter examining the pictures of other container gardens in magazines and books.  Keep a record of the containers that particularly appeal to your gardening sense of style and copy those designs and pots in your own garden.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Clay

"Flower pots are of many different kinds, but the common red earthen-ware are decidedly the best, because they are the most porous, and consequently do not retain the moisture so as to be injurious to the plants they contain."

Mrs. Loudon, Gardening for Ladies and Companion to The Flower Garden


Clay pots are the best pots for growing plants.  I say this after 20 years in the nursery business and 20 years of growing a wide variety of plants in every kind of container in the industry.  To be sure, clay has its drawbacks but its ability to support plant life is not one of them.  Clay is heavy, it breaks if dropped and is more expensive than plastic.  These are the drawbacks to clay cited by other gardeners but these are more than compensated in my mind by the superior growth conditions clay provides.

I was delighted when I obtained Mr. Julius Heinrich's 1911 book on container gardening and found he shared my opinion.  In a discussion of pots he wrote, "After years of trial and experience, I find that the best pots in which to grow plants are the common clay pots."

Clay pots breathe.  Moisture moves through the sidewalls as well as downward through the soil.  This moisture on the side walls evaporates during hot summer days providing a potential cooling effect to the soil and plant roots that is not duplicated in plastic pots.  Clay is heavier than other pot materials but this is to its advantage during summer windstorms.  It does not tip over as readily, leaving crushed plants and ruined blossoms scattered in its wake. I like the solidity that clay brings to the garden and I confess that while the look of clay has been duplicated in plastic pots, the ability to breathe has not.  Clay, unlike plastic, will not break down in sunlight and can, with careful handling, last for many years in the garden.


"To place a beautiful vase in a distant part of the grounds, where there is no direct allusion to art, and where it is accompanied only by natural objects, as the overhanging trees and the sloping turf, is in a measure doing violence to our reason or taste, by bringing two objects so strongly contrasted, in direct union."

AJ Downing  Landscape Gardening


If clay pots are going to be used, purchase the high or hot-fired clay.  These will not spall, flaking off pieces of their sides, in the garden during the winter months.  I have some of these good pots in my garden that are twenty years old while the cheaper clay pots only last a few years before they must be tossed into the local landfill.  The more expensive high temperature fired pots can even be left outside (although I do not recommend it - it has happened) over the winter in our zone 4 garden without damage.


Gardening Wisdom is out of print now but used copies still float around and I put an ebook together here 

My website articles on container gardening can be found here