A Pattern Garden
by Valerie Easton  

Pattern 13: Containers

Containers allow for great garden artistry along with maximum flexibility. With containers, we can indulge both plant lust and our desire for ornamentation and elaboration, without lasting repercussion to budget or landscape. Nothing challenges and improves a gardener's eye for combinations like composing container plantings. Design, proportion, color, and shape are all vital to the orchestration of container vignettes, for they're a microcosm of the garden, its distilled essence stuffed into a single pot. Pots are the perfect place to grow plants too flamboyant to blend well in the garden, possible invasives, or plants so new to us we aren't sure yet how they'll develop, as well as plants too tender to make it through the winter.


Instead of a bouquet of different kinds of flowers stuffed into a single pot, a more modern look is one kind of plant per container, which best shows off an individual plant's characteristics.

Copyright ©2007 Timber Press, Inc. Text excerpts from A Pattern Garden copyright © Valerie Easton. Photographs copyright © Jacqueline Koch, except photos on Bridges, Gates, and Shelters pages copyright © Allan Mandell; and photo on Water page copyright © Richard Hartlage. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of the publisher.