It’s finally time for one of my favorite gardening days of the year: redoing the front porch containers. Each spring, after the winter’s pansies poop out from rising temperatures, I get the instant gratification of putting together tiny minigardens to be appreciated up close each time I enter the house.
This year my mom and I discovered a fantastic greenhouse, Milmont, over the mountain in Stuarts Draft. Not only did they have varieties of plants that have been on my wish list for ages, and that I’d resigned myself to having to mail-order, they also had a thriving colony of purple martins living right near their greenhouses. Awesome, rare birds + spectacular, rare plants = pretty much my idea of heaven.
I came home with all the material for this summer’s container gardens and broke down the old arrangements, composting the spent pansies and then refreshing the pots with new soil and granular fertilizer. Then I got down to designing.
This year I wanted high-contrast color, dramatic leaf form, and to play around with some black foliage. To that end, the centerpiece of each container is a black Colocasia ‘Ilustris,’ and that tone is picked up again in black sweet potato vine, ‘Illusion Midnight Lace,’ which will spill over the edges. I always like to add rusty red-pink colors, because they are my favorite and tie into the color of my front door. For that I used Coleus ‘Colorblaze Keystone Kopper.’ I was really drawn to the icy, otherworldly green of Helichrysum petiolare ‘Lemon Licorice,’ to contrast with the black and brighten everything up. For color, I popped in a dwarf Gaura ‘Karalee Petite Pink,’ as well as Calibrachoa ‘Minifamous Double Magenta,’ which has bright pink flowers that look like tiny roses. And for a ringer, I added a shot of pure, bright blue with Evolvulus ‘Blue My Mind.’
The key to good containers, in addition to following the “thriller, spiller, filler” formula, is to stuff in way more plants than you think could fit. Yes, containers planted this fully require more attention with watering and feeding, but you get an instant, lush look. I already know that some of these plant will, if they’re happy, grow too large for these containers, so throughout the summer I will need to keep them trimmed and shaped up to continue looking nice. Not a hard task, and the added bonus is I can root the trimmings and make more plants!
The front porch, all dressed up for summer: the large evergreens below are some form of Chamaecyparis, which I’ve had for more than two years. They are very slow-growing and do okay in pots as long as they don’t dry out, but eventually they will need to be planted out in the yard. I refreshed their soil last year. The plant in the smallest pot is Sedum ‘October Daphne,’ which I cut back each winter for fresh regrowth.
And a purple martin parting shot:
