Tips for Making Container Gardens

• Mix plants with at least three textures of foliage to make a container garden interesting
• Use plenty of plants that are foliage plants (with no flowers) in your designs.  In most cases, foliage color, leaf shape, and texture are just as important as flowers themselves.
• Some good foliage contrasts would include: downy with glossy; dark with gray; small with large, yellow with violet.
• Use colorful foliage (like Coleus) to “echo” the color of flowers in the container.
• Vary the shape of the flowers in the container garden to add interest.
• Sometimes you just have to do some “snipping and tucking: of faster growing plants when they are mixed in with slower growing ones.  Otherwise, you will lose the slower ones and your design gets destroyed.
• Vegetative annuals mix well with other annuals, perennials, tropicals, and bulbs.  Everything and anything goes as long as it is pleasing to the eye of your customer.
• Nothing lasts forever! Container gardens need to be gardened.  Plants in container gardens need to be trimmed, dead headed, and replaced.

Definitions of Common Terms

Grow Together Container
Transplanting an assortment of plugs into a 10 inch, 12 inch, or larger container and growing them on to a marketable stage.

Put Together Container
Transplanting marketable size, flowering, usually 4 inch or larger plant material into planters

Plant Positions in Container Gardens
A plant can fulfill different positions in a design depnding on the size of the container.

Center plants: provide compact, upright growth to fill int eh crown of the container.

Filler plants: typically have compcatt, upright growth, and round out the top of the container

Corner plants: grow well over the container’s edge and benefit from a corner position where they have maximum elbowroom.

Edge plants: drape over the edge, softening the look of the container and filling out the space between its corners.

Color Bowl
A small, round container placed on a table top to house compact, annual plants.

Combination Basket
A hanging basket and usually holds mounding and trailing plants and excludes tall upright varieties.

Container Garden
Includes all shapes and sizes of containers, usually sitting on the ground, sometimes massive enough to hold all types of plant species including woodies, perennials, and bulbs.

Color Theory

There are several ways to use color to add interest and appeal to your container gardens.  Two of these are using color echoing and different color harmonies.

“Color echoing” is using repetition of color from one cultivar to another.  For example, using a white flower to echo the white in a green and white variegated foliage.  Repetition of any design element adds rhythm to the design and leads your eye around and around the design.

For more information go to:
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/floriculture/container-garden/lesson/index.html