Gardening in Small Spaces – Containers
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Collapse ▲While blowing the leaves off of my front porch with my electric leaf blower recently, I started to think about summer container gardening. The empty pots that emerged from under the leaves contained the corpses of last year’s container garden. I began to contemplate the philosophical implications of the garden as a living, breathing, growing and dying entity.
Where do last year’s plants go when they die? I think that each year the garden plants die and are reincarnated as container gardens on the porches and decks and sitting areas in my garden. More and more containers appear yearly.
I have gardened in every home I have ever lived. It seems that at each residence my garden starts small, confined to outlined beds and designated areas. Eventually the garden creeps out of the flower beds and shrubbery. Slowly the garden covers my home like the “Blob” enveloping a movie theatre. From the native coral honeysuckle vine that climbs over the fence to the fragrance of the tea olive, daphne, and sweetbox shrubs wafting in the open window to the containers full of plants in all of my outdoor living spaces, the garden makes its way onto and into my home.
Kitchen Garden
First it starts with the vegetable garden. The first summer finds the edible plants sneaking their way out of the veggie patch and ending up at the base of the stairs in the form of an herb garden. Rosemary, thyme, basil, peppers and oregano fill the voids in the territory newly claimed by the garden. Some of the herbs eventually end up in pots nestled in nooks and crannies around the garden, porches and house in sun or shade depending on the plant species. A kitchen garden is born.
Hanging Baskets
Then hanging baskets appear on the front porch. Ferns materialize the second summer I am in a home and large terracotta pots appear in the corners on the floor soon thereafter. The containers end up full of snapdragons, dianthus, coleus, acoris, and creeping jenny among other summer annuals and perennials.
Hanging baskets and containers at Brigg’s Garden Center in Horseshoe, NC
Containers
Soon thereafter the back porch containers manifest themselves. Large decorative containers with evergreen trees and shrubs in the center surrounded by flowers seem to form from the ethers on the back patio and deck. Some contain ‘Sky Pencil’ hollies surrounded by acorus and flowering annuals like coleus, while others contain dwarf arborvitaes surrounded by petunias. The filler, thriller and the spiller…isn’t that what the garden writer is supposed to say?
Indoor Plants
Finally, three to five years after inhabiting a domicile, the garden moves indoors in the form of cut flowers from the native plants in the pollinator garden in vases on the diner table and kitchen counter. Somehow a terrarium moss and fern garden appears which inevitably ends up home to animals such as snails, lizards and newts. Friends give you cuttings of house plants such as a Christmas cactus, Tradescantia purple and pothos vines, sedums, dragon plants, spider plants and before you know it, the entire home is on the verge of a botanical take over.
Putting away the leaf blower, I realize today’s empty pots that still contain last year’s soil are future containers full of summer flowers. Then I understand that the garden does not creep over my house at all but it is I who brings the garden onto and into my home. It is time to hit the nearest garden center.