If you’ve got some spare pots lying around, an easy and effective way to beautify your garden is to plant them up with some nice flowers and foliage. Fill them up (leaving space for the plants) with some good multi-purpose compost and heed Laetitia’s advice on which plants to select.
If you do have some beautiful pots on the plot, don’t forget to share them with us using the hashtag #30daygardenchallenge.
You’re going to love me forever for this tip. You see, if you manage to steer yourself away from bedding plants and instead go for something permanent and evergreen in your empty containers (and I hope they are large ones), then you’ll be giving yourself the ultimate five-minute gift: a beautiful container that you never have to change or do anything to, but which will give you pleasure and loveliness for years to come.
Here are my top three evergreens for containers. It’s also fine to add topiary, in the form of box or yew, to this list:
Healthy lavender in a terracotta pot (or indeed in profusion in the ground) is one of the
more joyful things in life. Emphasis, though, must be made on ‘healthy’. Lavender plants are everywhere right now; soft and hummocky and about to burst, washing your summer garden in a glorious, buzzing purple haze.
The reality, of course, is that lavender often becomes a casualty of its own allure in those early days. Bought on a whim and plonked somewhere unsuitable, it may flower for the summer, but will flounder eventually over a cold wet winter. Avoiding this depends very much on the type of soil in which it lives: the ground must be gritty and free-draining (think Mediterranean hillside), rather than cloddish and muddy where it will simply rot.
Ensure then, that you add plenty of grit to the existing soil if necessary so that the roots never get properly wet. If you are planting a lavender hedge, then it’s worth raising the ground and planting it on a ridge so that any lingering water drains away quickly.
By which I mean tender plants grown specifically for a season – and sold to you as either plugs early in the year, or as larger plants. Keep your choice edited; a maximum of two different plants in profusion is more cohesive than a different thing in each pot.
A few of my favourites are:
Every year I order a monstrous quantity of Gladiolus callianthus (scented, white, lily-like things with a deep purple blotch in the middle) and they form the backbone of my containers over the summer and autumn. They can also be put in the ground, filling in all the little gaps that may be nagging at you.
In short, they are a very good thing, and if you don’t have any yet, then I’d urge you to get some, and stagger their planting, putting some in now, and another lot in at the end of May, which will give you owers all the way through until the end of October.
Gladiolus are not the only summer bulbs though. Lilies, Crocosmia, Kniphophia and nerines are all worth having as long as you can give them the right conditions.
The right perennials for pots are a five-minute gardener’s dream. They don’t need fussing or faffing with, like bedding, and they certainly don’t need replacing year after year. Here are my favourites:
‘The Five Minute Garden’ by Laetitia Maklouf was published in 2020 by National Trust Books. To order your copy, visit pavilionbooks.com.
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