Tag Archives | container gardening

Pots, planters, windowboxes, and hanging baskets: If it can hold potting soil, we’ll stick a plant in it. Some of us have gotten the knack for creating and maintaining amazing container plantings and use those skills to the utmost. Others of us aren’t quite as successful, but we can admire what our more successful counterparts have achieved and try to learn from them. Fortunately, quite a few of our container-savvy readers have generously shared their container-care and design pointers this month, so we should all be in good shape for a more successful container-gardening season. Continue Reading →

I have always been a huge fan of Chanticleer, what was once a private estate garden in the suburbs of Philadelphia that was turned into a public garden in the early 1990s by its owner, Adolph Rosengarten and led by the extremely talented Chris Woods, and in recent years by the very capable hands of Bill Thomas, formerly of Longwood Gardens. One of the many things that Chanticleer horticulturists/gardeners do so very,very well is container plantings. Among all of the other exuberant and edgy planting, in almost any other garden, the container plantings would be swallowed up. But not so at Chanticleer: which is a testament to how container plantings are conceived, designed and planted as individual pieces of art. Continue Reading →

I’m so enamored with using containers in the garden that I sometimes don’t even bother to plant them. And empty pot can work wonders in the garden. Of course it has to be a good-looking pot, but given that, a container can become an instant ornament in almost any garden scene. All you have to do is drop it into place. Look what this big-big enough for me to crawl into-pot did for Brie Quimby’s Farmington, CT driveway. I love the way the smooth human-made contours of a pot contrast so sharply with the more organic shapes of plants. Continue Reading →