Best Way to Quickly Decorate Your Garden with Container

One of the quickest and most effective ways of transforming the look and ambience of any garden is to decorate it with richly-planted containers. Brightly-colored flowers and leaves make everybody feel good, and in containers they can be positioned close to a house, making them immediately noticeable.

The great advantage of containers is that they can be positioned wherever they will have the most dramatic impact. More often than not they are positioned on patios, near entrances or beneath windows – the places in the garden where they are most likely to be seen.

Garden containers come in all shapes and sizes and range dramatically in price, whether they be hanging-baskets, windowboxes, troughs, standard pots or dramatic amphorae. Whichever you use, they will transform your garden and enhance the backdrop of your house.

Positioning containers in attractive combinations, perhaps at the sides of doors and windows, alongside patios or to decorate long, bland walls, is a yearly opportunity to create different shape and color features. Here are a few short­cut arrangements to consider.

Hanging-baskets:

• Position a hanging-basket either side of a front door. Ensure that each basket is suspended about twice its width from the door’s edge to allow for the display’s width when the plants are mature.
• Secure hanging-baskets either side of a window; ensure that the foliage slightly cuts across the window’s vertical edges. Position a large trough or planter under the window.
• Use hanging-baskets in a combination with a windowbox. To prevent the heads or shoulders of passers-by knocking hanging-baskets, position tubs underneath; but not where water from the basket drips on them.
• Suspend hanging-baskets from the edges of verandahs, summer-houses and car-ports, to brighten up these structures.
• Use hanging-baskets to clothe walls, but not near corners.

Wall-baskets and troughs:

• Use wall-baskets on walls, between windows and to clothe bland walls.
• Use wall-baskets in combination with two upright, slow-growing conifers in large pots or tubs positioned on either side.
• Place troughs on low walls at the edges of patios. Alternatively, create a false wall by positioning troughs on bricks.
• Position troughs at the edges of flat roofs. Place each container on 2.5cm-square pieces of wood to enable water to drain from the compost. It also allows the trough to be picked up easily.

Pots and other containers:

A group of pots in various sizes and shapes in a corner of a patio creates color over a long period. It also becomes a focal point, perhaps deflecting attention from a less attractive part of a garden.

• Position urns at the tops of steps. Placed on plinths, urns will create an even more striking and distinguished effect.
• Wooden tubs, planted with daffodils and polyanthus, look good on either side of an otherwise bare entrance.
• Two large, white tubs planted with half-standard sweet bay trees look superb on either side of an entrance.
• Square, wooden, Versailles-type planters are ideal for agapanthus (African lily), especially when positioned along the edge of a patio.