In Praise of Small Pots

       A garden large enough for even a brief stroll brings more to the eye than I can absorb or record in a single stroke.  In my garden, 120 feet deep, a walk with a notebook ends with at least two pages of notes. Six astilbe here, plus a few more ferns filling in nicely there, a crowd of hellebores at the corner, and so on. 

I tend to see the Big Picture and overlook the Small.  But last year a visit to Pondside Nursery introduced me to the pleasures of tiny plants: thrift, miniature daisies, carpet tulips.  Something is always happening in even the tiniest of pots, a single blossom to be removed, a decision between pinching back to encourage fullness or prolonging the life of a single brave cosmos. 

       

Plumbago with Unidentified Companion

To keep up with an inventory of small pots my day starts early – up at 6:30, one double espresso with milk, and then the watering starts.  I use an elegant watering can, a pleasure to carry, the gift of two gentlemen gardeners. I prefer it to a hose; although it requires walking to and from the kitchen sink it provides marginally more exercise than standing still with a hose on “mist.”

I have another system if I must be away for a few days.  I water well and leave saucers filled with additional water under every pot, save the biggest.  Everyone fusses over root rot, but I’d rather risk that than death by drying out.

The Beginning of the Terrace Pot Garden

My terrace inventory so far: One dahlia, one plumbago, 4 oxalis, 2 helichrysum, 1 calocasia, 1 alocasia, 1 nemesia, 2 tiny blue unidentified South African plants.  These are augmented by a few larger pots, a mandevilla “Alice DuPont” (soft pink and not garish), and one hefty palm.

Mandevilla 2018

“Alice Dupont” was the first mandevilla to appear on the market.  Named for the owner of Winterthur, I found it in their gift catalog in the early 1990’s. I bought two, one was left in a sunroom where it climbed to the ceiling, through the roll-up bamboo blinds and was left there, dead, for at least a decade. The other mandevilla went to Saretta Barnet where it was well watered and climbed to her second story deck. This is a photograph of me standing next to it. 

Mandevilla 1992

Indoors, I have two myrtle topiaries in the smallest of pots, switching their locations every two weeks.  One is in a sunny window; the other on the mantelpiece in a deep interior room.  Two weeks in the sun and two in the dark seem to work well enough so that the plants don’t notice the change.  At the time of the switch-over they get minimal haircuts to trim their neatly rounded shape.

Sunny Beech Street Verge

Every day on my morning walk to the Mobil station to pick up the NY Times, I pass a sunny verge on Beech Street planted with pots of marigolds, cleome, tomatoes and odds and ends that need more sun than the homeowner’s backyard offers.  I have no such sunny verge on Livingston Street; my trash yard is the only place bright enough for annuals.  It was formerly home to garbage cans, old tools, and broken chairs.  It is now a gravel piazzetta, and houses to plants deserving more sun than I can offer elsewhere – zinnia and cosmos (flowers of childhood and my early gardens), pots of kitchen herbs and, the occasional odd experiment, this year nigella.

The Piazzetta

I’ve always planted pots with a single variety as opposed to elaborate mixed pots. If you pot up one variety to a container you can group them anyway you like, changing heights and relationships by placing a few on inverted pots.  I have only one mix – a rectangular zinc container at the front door.  It’s always a palette of green and white – caladium or a variegated-leaf geranium, bacopa and scutellaria.

Complex arrangements of three or more varieties in a pot with a strong architectural presence is fine in a house with a strong architectural presence, or lining restaurants and shops where you need to make a statement that will draw customers in.  Bread Alone in Rhinebeck is a fine example of this. Natalka Chas does all the flowers and seasonal pots, inside and out, in Rhinebeck and their other locations. She is a master of the combination of scale, design and variety. It’s worth dropping by.

If you want to experiment with complex pots, the most deliriously ambitious book on pot gardening is Ray Rogers' "Pots in the Garden". There is so much you can take from it, even if you only want a sprig or two. (Timber Press, Amazon, $18.90 new.)

In my heavily shaded garden I’m ruthless with colors that don’t work and have even been known to cut back the flowers of hostas. In pots enjoying a bit of sun I’m more forgiving. With my morning coffee I can sit alongside an unidentified blue flower in an old Guy Wolfe pot on an even older lichen-covered stone table and do what I seem to do best -- stare off into the distance, ostensibly thinking.

An Unidentified Morning Companion

---

Correction:

Yesterday's reference to the Winterthur catalog should have read "early 1990's", not "early 1900's."  I would not have been around to see it in the early 1900's.  Thanks go to Joseph Kaufman, a careful reader in Jerusalem.

How Does A Garden Start?

Ideally, you study a site, consider the exposure, assess the light levels, analyze the soil, and factor in your lifestyle and the needs of your family. In reality, you find a house, indulge your desire for tomatoes (even though you don’t have enough sun, and will not be around to water), satisfy your lust for climbing roses (even though you don’t have enough sun for this either, nor do you have anything for roses to climb on), and then you stumble through a few years of expensive mistakes.

A clematis happier than it's companion rose. 

In my most recent garden – and I expect my last – I was saved from some mistakes because I was a renter before I became an owner.  What I was willing and allowed to undertake was limited.  A little tinkering with an existing bed was about it.  When I approached my landlady with the desire to make an ambitious garden, she offered to sell me the house instead.    

From the garden’s standpoint, I had the advantage of having spent several seasons just staring and imagining.  An excellent practice if you have a few extra years.  The design of the garden evolved slowly with the help of skilled artisans and practitioners, but that is the subject of another post.   What is useful to know at this point is that over many years and several gardens I have established a few rules for myself, some honored and others honored only in the breach.

Rule 1:  Respect your neighbors and the neighborhood. You will not have this to consider if you own a large property with no neighbors or are in the middle of a forest.  But if you are in a village or on a block with sidewalks and neighbors, whatever you do should be compatible in style and feel with whatever is going on next door and down the block.  You may not like it, but deal with it kindly.  Don’t build walls and plant dense hedges.  Try something soft and seamless; a mixed shrub border works well.  Or arbors and trellises will soften something you wish to see less of, without obliterating your neighbor.

Be aware of the effect of your street-side planting, its relationship to the house, passersby, and the rest of the block.  I am not happy with my work in this department, and instead of figuring out a good solution I am wandering around the neighborhood looking at front yards that are drearier than mine.  Below is an example -– a very grand house surrounded on all side by gloomy, thorny, unkempt crabapples.

A screen planting helping neither the house nor the street. 

Rule 2:  Take your time.  Give careful thought not to what you want your garden to look like, but how you want to live in it.  Do you want to have your morning coffee outside the kitchen door?  Do you want to hide out in a corner of the garden where no one will find you?  What do you want to see from your favorite vantage point?  I have fought all comers to hold on to a particular view from the kitchen table, through a glass door and up into towering walnuts.  All I want is more of the same – larger glass panes, thinner door frames, more to see.

Rule 3:  You will be gardening in a hostile environment, no matter how benign it seems. Be prepared and stay strong. There will moles or voles, squirrels or rabbits, hail storms or droughts, endless rainfall or none, strange mold and fungus, leaf rollers, mysterious viruses, odd disappearances and occasional resurrections.

Rule 4:  Try and hold on to something of the past, of the gardeners who have been there before you. Whether it’s the flowers they planted or the tools they used, save and continue to use and nurture what you can. 

A forgotten, purely decorative well house. 

When I arrived on Livingston Street my neighbor Marian Faux already had a flower border on the narrow panel dividing our properties. Over these few years we doubled it and then doubled it again, pushing the margins of what will tolerate only partial sun and black walnuts.  It has at last, in its fourth year, “come into its own.”  By this I mean Marian and I have become more accepting of its limitations.  

Rule 5:  No matter how much you are prepared to spend, it will cost more.

Given all this, why do we even start a garden? Why do we persevere? Pick any summer day, and you will have your answer.