How to Buy Plants for Container Gardens (3:33)
By Pamela Crawford
‘How to Buy Plants for Container Gardens’ (3:33) teaches you how to avoid one of the most common mistakes in container gardening: buying plants that don’t meet your expectations. You spot a lovely plant, buy it, and it stops blooming a week later. And you had expected it to bloom all season long!
Take one of my container gardening books with you – whichever fits your plan:
1. Easy Container Gardens – best for flowers and ornamental plants in traditional planters.
2. Instant Container Gardens – best for flowers and ornamental plants in side-planted planters.
3. Easy Container Combos, Vegetable & Flowers – for vegetables.
4. Easy Container Combos, Herbs & Flowers – for herbs.
I design my containers at garden center prepared to look up whatever plant information I need with the books I have with me. It is much easier to work with available plants than to design on paper at home, only to find that the garden center doesn’t have what you want. I shop at many different garden centers for my plants and have found excellent selections at most of them. My garden center trips have became design adventures that I anticipate with pleasure.
Be adventurous with your selections. Container gardening gives you an opportunity to try many different looks, which is often difficult in a structured garden.
Learn to trust your eyes and instincts when putting your combinations together. Pick the plants that make you smile!
Steps to choosing plants for one container design:
1. Choose your centerpiece first, which will be the tallest plant in your arrangement. Look for something you really like. Look the plant up in your book and see if it meets your expectations. If so, you are ready for step two.
2. Put your centerpiece on a cart and push it around the garden center. Look for smaller plants that look good with it.
3. Once you have found a smaller plant you like, be sure it shares the same growing conditions – like water, light, and fertilizer – with your centerpiece. Look it up in the book!
4. Choose another small plant that looks good with the others. Again, be sure it shares the same growing conditions with the other plants you have chosen and that it meets your expectations.
5. Arrange the smaller plants around the larger one, as you would in your container. This is a way of guesstimating how many plants you’ll need.
6. Go home and plant it!
Pamela Crawford designs unique planters for kinsmangarden.com and writes gardening books. She is considered one of the best-known container garden professionals in the United States. This video is appropriate for the entire country.
She also designs landscapes in Palm Beach County, Florida. This video is appropriate throughout Pamela’s service area, including Boca Raton landscapes, town of Palm Beach landscapes, Palm Beach Gardens landscapes, Jupiter landscapes, and Wellington landscapes. These subtropical areas have some of the longest growing seasons for annuals in the continental United States and are ideal for container gardens.
This article is taken from ‘Container Gardens for Florida’ by Pamela Crawford.
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