Potted Garden: Three Designs For Function & Beauty

DESIGN | by DEBRA PRINZING

CREATE A GARDEN-IN-A-POT and discover what a breeze it is to “contain” your favorite plants in an urn, vessel or bowl.

© ROBIN AVNI

Gardening in a container is like one-stop shopping, a solution to any challenge your yard throws at you.

Is your soil crummy? No problem — when you pour a bag of organic potting soil into a container, you’re creating a healthy growing environment for your favorite plants (and their roots).

Are you squeezed for space? No problem — there’s a perfectly-sized container for any garden location, including patios, decks or balconies. Containers add flexibility to your garden because you can move them around to “fill” bare spots in the landscape and infuse color and texture where things look dull.

© ROBIN AVNI

Here are my three favorite container recipes for function and beauty:

• Edible and accessible: Lettuces and herbs thrive in pots because they don’t need a lot of root space. Place your bountiful container by the back door and you’ll quickly be able to clip the freshest of ingredients for salads, sautés and soups galore.
• Stunning succulents: From the old-fashioned hens-and-chicks to über-fashionable agaves, succulents are both stylish and low maintenance. Create your own succulent-friendly planting medium by blending equal parts organic potting soil and cactus mix (which often contains pumice, humus and peat moss for improved drainage).
• A potted palette: Unify all of your planters by gathering decorative containers in your favorite color scheme. Even if you have a hodge-podge collection of plants, by displaying them in all-blue, all-red, or all-terra-cotta vessels, you’ll give the garden a pulled-together appearance.

Show off your style with containers. Sometimes it’s more about the drama and scale of the pot than about what you’ve planted in it.