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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| An Unidentified Morning Companion
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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.
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