A true-blue grouping (left) in Sunset Magazine’s test gardens; Silvery succulents (right) thrive in ice-blue containers for a satisfying grouping at Longwood Gardens, 2006

Ever since I relocated from Seattle to Los Angeles, nearly 2 years ago now, I have relied more than ever on container gardening. With a confounding, on-again, off-again irrigation system that will cost the equivalent of a year’s grad-school tuition to completely repair, and with rock-hard soil that endured years smothered by the previous owner’s idea of weed control (black plastic sheeting covered with red lava rock “mulch”), I’m desperate to grow plants in spite of unwelcome conditions.

But where? And how to keep them alive when it’s too hot and dry for anything but succulents to look good?

The answer is a container garden. Gardening in a container is like one-stop shopping. Maybe we should call it “one-stop gardening.” Here are some of the best reasons for gardening in pots:

Why grow a container garden?         

•  Move plants and architectural interest above the ground’s surface:  You’ll enjoy beauty closer to eye level, as in this cool vintage vessel that caught my eye at Chanticleer Gardens in Pennsylvania (2006).

 

 

 

Edible and Accessible: Lettuces and herbs thrive in pots, like this over-sized terracotta “strawberry” pot at right - measuring 48 inches tall, created several years ago by the designers at Emery’s Garden in Lynnwood, Wash.! At left, ornamental peppers and kale in a pot at Longwood Gardens are food for the eyes.

 

 

Define a focal point: Signal the entrance to the garden, such as with these two glossy Asian pots that contain lush golden hostas. Mounted on pillars, they announce: “Come this way,” a way that’s made more enjoyable because this portal leads to the gardens of David Lewis and George Little, Bainbridge Island artists.

 

 

Provide a natural perimeter: Anywhere in the garden, such as at the edge of a deck or patio, pots can act as a verdant “wall” to contain, deter, protect or enclose. I particularly enjoy seeing three identical pots, lined up as a formal barrier - it’s plant-filled architectural interest. Here, at the edge of Peter Norris Home & Garden’s parking lot, these giant iron urns hold gold-streaked phormiums (left). A trio of fern-filled pots defines the edge of a formal planting scheme at Robert Dash’s Madoo Garden (right).

 

Containers add flexibility to your garden design because you can move them around. That task is made easier if your heavier containers are on movable saucers, i.e., “Plants on Wheels.” Such groupings enhance the strengths and mask weaknesses of the garden.

You can use a container to showcase a collector’s plant or perhaps, as is the case for me, pamper a plant that isn’t quite ready for the harsh realities of the climate you’re in. Here, in Zone 10, that means keeping a hydrangea happy. Back in Seattle, Zone 8, it meant keeping an echeveria happy! Funny how that works.

I like to call another cool container idea ”Singular Sensation,” as in one plant-one pot (or, many of one plant in one pot). If you’re going for a textural or sculptural effect, this is the style for you. Ornamental grasses, such as purple fountain grass or Japanese hako grass, are so dramatic when planted by themselves in a container. The design at left was created by Tim Moshier of Cambium Landscape Architecture in Seattle.

 

Collect similar plants, such as coleus, heucheras or sedums, in a container for a tapestry-style design. The eye is drawn to the overall texture, and then each single plant’s leaf color or unique foliage patterning pops out! The heuchera design shown here is from Swanson’s Nursery (Seattle); the sempervirens in a pot was created by Carina Langstraat and Erik Wood of Langstraat-Wood Landscape Architecture (Seattle).

When the garden is in its quiet phase, such a between flushes of roses, or in the hottest months of July and August, containers offer you a chance for continual color. This can also be described as “instant gratification” because potted gardens often do what the rest of your garden isn’t able to. I loved this outrageous topiary-style mound of ornamental cabbage, tufted at top with a lemon-lime burst of Japanese sweet flag (Acorus gramineus) - from Wells Medina Nursery in Medina, Wash. Another visual color treat: Phormium paired with hebe ‘Quicksilver’ and one of the brilliant heathers of summer, perhaps Calluna vulgaris ‘Wickwar Flame’ (from Swanson’s Nursery).

Don’t forget the artistry of pots: Show off your style! Sometimes, it’s more about the drama and scale of the pot than about what you’ve planted in it. This is when your Ali Baba-sized containers can lend stature to the corner of a deck, patio, front porch or terrace. This is another Langstraat-Wood creation. Isn’t it cool how the enormous verdigris-glazed urn is “topped” with a mop of black mondo grass?

 

 

Even though pots are cool, plants are your most important design elements. Think about the “role” each plant will play as you select it for your container design:

1. Start with a Tall focal element, such as a columnar plant, an ornamental grass, or even a trellis in a pot on which a vine will climb. Ilex ‘Sky Sentry’ is a good choice.

 

 

 

2. Use mid-range plants for texture, color and foliage. These are the hard-working supporting actors in a pot. I love using variegated plants that pick up on the solid colors of the taller or trailing elements. Here (left) is a tricolor hebe, beautifully clustered around the base of a burgundy phormium. Delicious! At right, the lemon-green variegation of the mid-range plant echoes the lemon stripes on the blades of a tall grass. Left pot: Swanson’s Nursery; right pot: Longwood gardens.

3. Select trailing plants to soften the design and spill like fringe or tassels over the container’s edge. Never use predictable plants when you can choose from so many other varieties (ie, use fancy-leafed geraniums instead of plain-old green ones). I like to quote the ever-so-snobby (but delightful) Vancouver, B.C., garden designer and nursery owner Thomas Hobbs. In his wonderful book, “The Jewel Box Garden,” Hobbs takes on prosaic plant choices, such as bacopa. He describes this typical trailing plant as the “horticultural equivalent of white icicle lights” that people hang from their front porches at Christmastime. His favorite alternatives to bacopa? Among other things, he loves to use Senecio rowleyanus ‘String of Pearls’ or Dichondra argentea ‘Silver Falls’.

General guidelines and Planting Tips for Great Containers:

• Plant “mix” should be 70% structural plants or perennials + 30% seasonal plants. Seasonal plants don’t necessarily have to be annuals, but bulbs, tender perennials (begonias, fuchsias) or herbs.
• For best variety, design your container with a specific season in mind: Early Spring, Summer, Fall/Winter are good ones to shoot for. Don’t let your pots go dormant in the winter. Add something for interest even it it’s an ornamental “rust” art piece, berries/twigs, a bird nest, etc.
• To lighten the load, especially of a large pot, fill 1/3 of your pot with something that helps displace excess soil. I like to use upside-down black plastic pots (we all have lots of those!). Gravel is too heavy.
• Soil recipe: 1/3 planting compost + 2/3 fresh good-quality potting soil. When replanting seasonally, refresh soil with more planting compost.
• When renovating an old pot, start over with all new soil. If you’re working with very large pots and it’s impossible to remove all the soil, check for problem signs on existing plants. If everything looks healthy, just remove the top 1/3 of soil and replace w/above mixture . . . and plant away!
• When your pot is in full sun or you can’t water often, use a soil polymer in the mix for water retention.
• STUFF the pot, ignoring the “mature size” on the plant label. There will be plenty of soil for your crowded plants, and since they are regularly fertilized, they’ll be fine. Otherwise, you’ll have lonely-looking plants for the first ½ of the season.
• Watch out for dark-colored pots in full sun. They’ll bake your plants.
• It’s okay to mix some sun plants with shade plants if you don’t care about blooms. If you have great leaf texture and color, they can make for a winning design.
• Each time you water (usually daily during hot months) use diluted water-soluble fertilizer like Peters Professional or Miracle-Gro. This tip doesn’t apply to succulents, which you only need to water occasionally.
• Deadhead frequently and watch for pests.
• Do use great plants for long-term interest and variety. Here are some ideas: Unusual annuals, like the new Million Bells petunias; Variegated, sunset and lavender forms of Bacopa instead of the white variety; Helichrysum ‘Limelight’;  Salpiglossis (painted tongue); Bright-leafed pelargoniums (Mrs. Quilter or Vancouver); Euphorbia myrsinites (donkey tail); Carex buchananii ‘Viridis,’ C. elata ‘Aurea,’ C. ‘Ice Dancer’; Cerinthe major ‘Kiwi Blue’ or ‘Purpurascens’; Muehlenbeckia complexa (wire vine); Veronica ‘Georgia Blue’; Geranium ‘Ann Folkhard’; Fuchsia ‘Firecracker’

Have fun! I can’t write about container design without touching on whimsy. There’s serious rule-breaking allowed when you plant in a pot. And some of this means not taking ourselves so seriously. In 2002, Ravenna Gardens nursery in Seattle asked me to help judge its “Planted Junk” contest. We had a blast reviewing the clever, innovative entries. Here are some of my favs:

Nasturiums-in-a-kitchen glove. Hopefully, the fingertips have a few drainage holes poked in them. This design was mounted from a wire loop-style bracket. Perfect to hang just outside the kitchen window where you stand to do the dishes!

 

 

 

C’mon Baby Light my Fire. Here’s a perfect solution for the old hibachi grill! Plant a few flame-orange and fiery-red Celosias inside. Don’t forget to add charcoal briquettes as “mulch.” Cute for a patio, n’est ce pas?

 

 

 

Downsized office workers will find a new use for file drawers! An alternating stack of recycled metal drawers makes for a creative plant tower.

 

 

 

A few other outrageous plantings, spotted elsewhere:

A mixed annual design, spilling from a reclaimed wicker armchair. This caught my eye at the Van Dusen Flower Show several years ago.

 

 

 

What to do with an old clawfoot tub? Fill it with annuals! From Henry’s Plant Farm in Snohomish, Wash. 

July in Southern California dishes up a haze of purple in every hue. I recently snapped a few photos to capture the floral bounty around us.

It’s the weekend; time to be lazy and enjoy a little eye candy. So here we go:

Lavender-blue agapanthus cascades down the hillside in my neighborhood

This time of year, AGAPANTHUS takes over our ”East Hills” neighborhood. Seattle gardening friends, eat your eyes and hearts out! When I first visited this neck of the woods, in spring 2006, I was blown away by the appearance — shall I say ‘explosions’? — of lavender-blue agapanthus blooms on every corner of town.

“Okay, I guess I can live here after all,” I thought. I mentioned loving this plethora of agapanthus to my friend Nan Sterman, a California native and author of California Gardener’s Guide, Vol. 2.

“Oh, Debra, they’re gas station plants!” she exclaimed.

As I’ve said before. . . one woman’s gas station plant is another woman’s rare collector plant. Imagine describing it as a commonplace “filler” for the corner convenience store! I know of a few passionate souls in Seattle who willingly forked over $15 for a 2-inch Agapanthus ‘Blue Heaven’ cultivar from Heronswood (or, elsewhere spent $20 to $40 for larger pots of this pretty purple South African native). And then. And then. Well, if my efforts were at all representative, there was the breath-holding that occurred through the wet, chilly winter months, as we pretty much realized the true-blue agapanthus wasn’t going to emerge in great shape the following spring. Like many tender perennials, well, they were pricey annuals. Or, they were in need of massive amounts of pampering, such as potting up the fleshy rhizomes and moving them indoors for the winter.

But other purple beauties grow well up and down the coast, so here are two:

VERBENA BONARIENSIS, one of those excellent ’veil’ plants, to use a phrase coined by writer-friend Cathy Wilkinson Barash. The blooms are pinky-purple, small but effective en-masse, especially as they tower like little pom-poms on the tips of slender, but stiff 5-foot-long stems. Two of these Brazilian verbena plants growing together in a raised bed in our front garden create the perfect screen to hide me from the eyes of neighbors whenever I scurry outside in my PJs early in the morning.

And finally, LAVENDER is a happy camper here. Much happier with So Cal’s low-to-no precipitation than in winter-wet Seattle (although that never stopped me from growing lavender in my garden!). Feasting my eyes on swaths of lavender is really one of the joys of living. I recently had the privilege of touring friend Alisa Varney’s Ojai Lavender and Rose Co., where she grows upwards of 1,500 lavender plants.

What a beautiful scene: a stroll through Ojai Lavender and Rose Co.’s aromatic fields

The reason for my visit was to quiz this fellow writer and lavender expert on the best varieties and methods for our local Ventura and Santa Barbara county gardens. I profiled her in the July issue of 805 Living, a lifestyle monthly published in my backyard. In my ‘In the Garden’ column, I featured Ojai Lavender and Rose Co., along with New Oak Ranch, another cool source for locally-grown lavender.

Some of Alisa’s favorite lavender cultivars include ‘Provence’ (seen at left), ‘Grosso’  and ‘Alba’. The shrub-sized evergreen plants are long-blooming, resistant to deer and rabbits, and attract pollinators like bees and butterflies. She harvests armloads to sell to floral designers and wholesale clients eager for organic, field-grown, local flowers.

In 2003, when she first planted lavender in this former Valencia orange grove, Alisa was told that her loamy-clay soil had too much clay content for lavender to grow well. “But it is fine,” she says. “It only took two years for them to get really big.”

Nothing pleases her more than a morning spent gathering bundles of lavender, moving from one billowing row of scented plants to the next. “There’s something mellow about being here among the lavender,” Alisa confides. “I like to see all the bees it attracts.”

Her Ojai neighbors and fellow lavender growers Karen and Bill Evenden fell in love with lavender while sailing through the Mediterranean. They ended up in Ojai nearly six years ago, after searching for land that reminded them of the climate and culture of Croatia.

Among several crops at their 24-acre ranch, the couple grows 5,000 lavender plants, including ‘Provence’, ‘Grosso’, ‘Hidcote’ (an English variety) and ‘Buena Vista’.

On weekends from mid-June through late July, New Oak Ranch’s lavender fields are open for “u-pick” customers. For $5, you can grab a pair of clippers and harvest as much lavender as an 8-inch twisty-tie will hold. You might be drawn to the fields of ‘Buena Vista’ lavender, which Karen says holds its purple color longer than other varieties. “It’s very desirable for dried arrangements,” she suggests.

A self-described foodie and author of A Taste of Croatia, Karen admires lavender for its culinary uses. Her  favorite dessert involves just a few ingredients: Fold bruised lavender buds into sweetened whipped cream and serve over fresh strawberries. One bite guarantees a sublime summertime experience.

STYLISH SHED News:

Thanks to an invitation from Shirley Kerins of the Huntington Botanical Gardens, I spent Thursday afternoon with an enthusiastic audience of about 150 “shedistas,” who attended my lecture on “Creating the Backyard Shed of your Dreams.”

These folks endured what I consider sweltering summertime temperatures to visit the gorgeous Huntington landscape and sit in on my talk. I loved sharing stories of the passionate shed owners who come alive in the pages of Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways, thanks to Bill Wright’s wonderful photography.

Increasingly, I find that people just need a spark of an idea to get them re-visioning, re-imagining, and even renovating a little building in their backyard. It is so gratifying to meet kindred spirits who understand the allure of having a small, but separate sanctuary, especially if it’s in the garden. To borrow the name of a San Diego area garden art and container business, I’m a “Grateful Shed.”

 

 

Today, all I have to share are these photographs of my sole hydrangea plant. This pinky charmer lives on our covered porch, surviving the heat, I guess, because of its deeply shaded existence.

It is 90 degrees outside as I write at 7:30 p.m. With adequate water, this hydrangea seems to cope with close-to-the-century-mark temperatures. But if it wasn’t protected by the overhanging roof, it would be miserable.

In contrast, hydrangeas in Seattle can handle a few days of excessive heat, here and there. But their blooms and leaves get crispy when subjected to sustained hot-and-sunny summer conditions. All the more reason why I cherish owning at least one non-crispy specimen here in Zone 10!

This hydrangea was a “housewarming” gift nearly 2 years ago, given by my husband’s boss on the occasion of our move to SoCal. To me, “Miss Hydrangea,” it seemed ironic to receive a no-name, hothouse variety in a 1-gallon pot, cloaked in that crinkly-metallic florist paper. It nearly toppled over because the few enormous mop-head blooms were wildly out of proportion to the size of the plant itself. In my former garden (seen at left and right), I was lucky to grow several cool Japanese hydrangeas that were gifted to me by friend Richie Steffen of the Miller Garden. These babies seemed to think they were still growing in their native soil because they exploded in size over the period of a few years - only to crowd out the nearby path. (Although, I must confess that the huge mophead hydrangea shown here was also a housewarming gift that arrived in a 1-gallon florist’s pot: It was given by our then-new neighbor David when we completed construction and threw ourselves a move-in party in 1998!).

Back to this pink hothouse hydrangea, which sat on my kitchen counter and seemed to be mocking me. If she could have spoken, she would have said: “You think you’re such a great gardener? Well, guess what? No one here cares that you grew a dozen stunning hydrangea shrubs, not to mention two climbing hydrangeas, in your old Seattle garden. Try keeping me alive here in Zone 10!”

So that’s what I did. I transplanted the little puffball into a large container on the front porch. I inherited the pot from the previous owners, complete with a  spray emitter from the on-and-off-again functioning drip system. This vessel was once home to a scraggly peace lily (Spathiphyllum wallisii) but I had no qualms about replacing it with my little hydrangea. (My very first reaction when I saw this new property: Why are there so many houseplants in the ground? - Clearly, one woman’s houseplant is another woman’s shrub! That sums up the difference between Zone 7b-8a and Zone 10).

So this cotton-candy pink hydrangea is a constant reminder of the pleasures I experienced in my former garden. And don’t worry. I’m slowly figuring out how to “let go” of many of my hydrangea fantasies. Just let me have this one!

A beautiful bouquet, gathered from my former garden. Notice the voluptuous lacecap hydrangea on the left of this arrangement, one of my special varieties.