Australian House & Garden

Spring pots

The trouble with Spring is that it’s over too soon. It arrives with a rush of blossom and bulb. Huge chaliced cups of magnolia blooms appear almost overnight, as if flocks of white and pink parrots have alighted simultaneously on bare branches. Soft blossom bursts forth - also pink and white - on flowering fruit trees and a thousand daffodils, jonquils, crocus and hyacinths come spearing up through grass, their growth spurred on by the first warm rays of sun.

But it’s over all too soon and unless a gardener has discovered the tricks of succession - having summer flowering perennials waiting in the wings to succeed the Spring extravaganza - gardens can look dull and unrelievedly green.

However, there is a simple solution. The pot. Anyone who has ever visited the famous garden at Tresco Abbey in Cornwall will have noticed the giant urn-shaped pots set in niches along a high wall of mellow pink brick. But instead of dedicating each pot to a single species of flowering pot, they’ve packed them with a variety, treating the pot as an outside vase with tall ornamental grass behind, quick growing and long flowering annuals such as nicotiana in front, a splash of petunias, a flurry of daisies and, dangling over the edge of the pot cum vase, fuchsias or pelargoniums.

The thing is that savvy gardeners can emulate this kind of ‘vase of flowers’ effect in pots and pop them into any drab corner of the garden. Lots do grow stuff in pots but they tend to plant one pot with impatiens, another with petunias, another with daisies. The secret is to mix ‘em up and make colourful arrangements like vases of indoor flowers that have found their way outside to splash colour about after the Spring spectacular.

• Posted By: Leo at Large at 4.31PM

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