Nearly every house and backyard presents several attractive settings for container plants. Suburban gardens, estates, small city backyards, and summer cottages-all can be enhanced by this brand of gardening. A few of the seemingly endless possibilities enter entranceways, steps, courtyards, parapet, rooftops, balconies, patios, breezeways, lawns, driveways, walks, sundecks, windowsills, porches, summer houses, even ranking stumps can be used.



Let us birth with the door, a crucial instant for every house. A regular arrangement consists of alike container plants at each question of the door. If the house is informal, painted tubs will make a cheerful letter, while urns or ornamental pots are more appropriate if the architecture is prim. The arrangement, however, basic not be symmetrical, since a track container at whichever flank, particularly if the entry is off-pinpoint, is pleasing. A large specimen could be balanced by a grouping of small pots, and various other interesting combinations can be worked out. Sometimes, the front entranceway can moderate as an outdoor place for house plants, but be convinced they are not exposed to fervent sun and wind.

Unexpected areas like side and rear entrances can also perform as backgrounds for pot plants in casual groupings. For sunny steps, deem tubs of petunias, or dwarf dahlias, or boxes of herbs to be used in cooking. Tuberous begonias, fuchsias, patient Lucy, and fragrant nicotiana explain the catch of what to grow in shade.

Porches or verandas, traditional or contemporary in fashion, proposal several settings for pots, chance boxes, and lynching baskets. Indeed, the complete container patch can be concentrated there so that plants can be certainly cared for. If the overhang is open on three sides, it will give exposures to outfit a diversity of specimens.

The patio or veranda, beside, or outside the house, where family and friends determine to eat or relax, is an archetype locality. If it is reserved, excellent clipped evergreens and dispose pots in symmetrical rows, perhaps lined up against the house or along the tone of the veranda. If the spot is informal, make casual groupings of one or two tall plants with lesser ones in front. Either way, tolerate for a few large plants in tubs or boxes for accent and height.

Container plants may line walks and paths that pilot to the house, garage, or backyard. They can care on covered areas along fences and ramparts and on driveways where they are not in the way. If the driveway adjoins the foundation of the house, lodge containers may be located there.

Tops of plot or veranda parapet are ultimate spaces, too. Put small pots and boxes on tall, narrow parapet and large containers on low, broad surfaces. Hanging plants of ivy geraniums in the sun and fuchsias in the shade will force from stockade, as they do in the patios of Spain, Portugal, and Italy. On Rhodes, I recollect a fifteen-bottom block topped with a row of thirty glassy green tin cans full of roses and other plants.

Think of what you can do with rooftops and sundecks where considerable pause is regularly open. Here sun-loving plants, like geraniums, most annuals, cacti, and succulents can be grown, but, again, enter large specimens for height to give backyard ambiance. A few large boxes and planters for grass and bushes are sufficient but be certainly to include some evergreens for year-circular green.

Many gardeners like to addition container plants in flower precincts to present strange specimens, such as tropicals in the North. Large tubs can be set at the corners and small pots may be scattered among the unending acme plants. One gardener keeps a quantity of sealed pink Fiat Enchantress geraniums on hand to satisfy baring acne in her eclectic borders, tender them about as wanted. Most of the geraniums are in four-creep clay pots, but there are superior specimens for the focus of each grouping. Make assured their steady, sink pots a few inches into the ground.

You can always dress up the lamp station in your yard with container plants at the immoral or you can swing a lynching basket of lantana, perhaps from the top. Ivy geraniums in an old-fashioned black kettle are careful for the origin. Bare posts that support sectional roofs over patios or lined surfaces of contemporary houses look more attractive if preserved plants are clustered around the bases or eternal boxes for plants are built there. Try planting climbing ivy in a pot and train it to climb the posts.

Novelty containers-donkey carts, wheelbarrows, and whirling wheels-can be fun in some seats, but, of course, such planters must not be scalded. Usually they are set on lawns, on a patio or beside a gate or entryway. (If you life in a neighborhood that has the house owners association ensure with them first to see if this is permitted). Steps chief to a driveway or lane or to different levels in a patch can be emphasized with pot plants. A few can be given at the top or at the root of the stairs. And, there are other possibilities. Tree trunks cut to the ground or left a few feet high make good pedestals for large containers. In fact, this can be a solution to the snag of what to do with a chest too luxurious to remove. If you have a tree with driving shade, why not form a pretty session area around it and trim the place with containers of coleus, wax and other begonias, caladiums, ferns and other shade-tolerant plants.

These are just a few dreams for with container plants around your house and garden. Use your imagination and have fun. Happy Gardening!