Container Gardening
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- June
- 1
As I’ve said, I love old-fashioned red geraniums in terra cotta pots. (That’s a cement urn filled with orange begonias behind them.)
Many serious gardeners abandoned geraniums long ago as too ordinary, too common, too boring—sort of how many people feel about poinsettias at Christmas. But I still love them (poinsettias too)—so easy, so reliable, so generous with their flowers.
When potting up geraniums, I like a full look. I jammed five plants into each of these pots because I know geraniums don’t mind being crowded and pot-bound. These are a variety called ‘Americana Bright Red.’
For the two cement urns, I went for a more spare look, with lots of room for the plants to fill in.
I started with purple cannas that I dug up last October and stored in a brown paper bag in the basement. (I also found two begonias, with healthy pink eyes/buds, in the bag—not sure where they came from.)
Along with the cannas, I set in a couple of pots of sweet potato vine and purple scaevola to see how they might all look together.
Seems fine, so I unpotted the sweet potato and scaevola and fitted them around the cannas. Here’s the final. Looks a little sparse, but see how they fill in.
This entry was posted
on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 3:16 pm by Bill Cary.
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Bill Cary grew up in Louisville, Ky. His gardening was limited to growing parsley and impatiens on the windowsill of Manhattan walkups until the mid-1990s when he bought a rundown old chicken farm on 8 acres in the Hudson Valley. Now he spends his weekends chasing deer, hacking away at invasive shrubs and vines and wondering why he doesn`t have more meadow and less lawn.
