Longmeadow’s pots add a welcome punch of colour to all areas of the garden, and few plants look quite as good in terracotta as the humble pelargonium, says Monty
Wherever you sit in your garden, be it just outside the kitchen door or at the far end of a winding path, you must have pots. Lots of pots. Spanish patios are crammed with pots and that is, without doubt, the right approach. I don’t really buy into the minimalist idea of one perfectly placed pot, at least on a patio. Less is always less when it comes to terracotta.
But terracotta pots are expensive so it is important to use them to their maximum effect. This means either using plants that have a long season, such as pelargoniums, pansies or fuchsias, or having at least two quite separate plantings each year, which works well for bigger pots.
In high summer, I like to mix big, dramatic plants such as cannas or grasses with dahlias, cosmos, petunias, zinnias or whatever will flower repeatedly into autumn, and then replace these with a mass of tulips or daffodils and an overplanting of violas, pansies and wallflowers to give colour from mid-spring through to the frost-free weather of Whitsun.
I choose the plants in containers to complement the planting that surrounds them. So in the Jewel Garden, I like cannas and dahlias for their rich colour and drama. I tend to use a large centrepiece, such as Canna ‘Wyoming’, and fit three large dahlias around that, like ‘Grenadier’ or ‘Bishop of Llandaff’, and then squeeze in whatever cosmos, nasturtiums and petunias I think will work. And I do mean ‘squeeze’: I pack the pots tight for maximum performance.
But in other parts of the garden I might use a single prostrate rosemary or a large display of simple white cosmos ‘Purity’. I have no formula but use plants I like and which are part of the overall picture rather than standing out from it. If you have an expensive terracotta pot it makes sense to use it for as much of the year as possible, so all ours are double-booked. The tulip pots are used for dahlias, with the tulips lifted and planted into a nursery bed for the leaves to die back. The bulbs are then used for cut flowers the following year. Irises, daffodils and fritillaries give of their best in early spring in terracotta and then are downgraded into plastic pots for the rest of the year and their pots used for chillies. But the rule is that a big pot has to work for 12 months of the y
