Keep it Contained

You can hardly get to the back door here at the moment for pots full of favourite things. There's been a succession of scented plants creating wafts of fragrance, both from their flowers and their leaves, since the spring, starting with Pittosporum tenuifolium 'Irene Paterson' with its tiny chocolate-purple flowers giving off such a sweet honey scent. One of the best is the lemon verbena (Aloysia triphylla). We've had this plant for years and have dragged the pot back into the old greenhouse for the winter at the end of each season. There the leaves have shrivelled, died and dropped, leaving a misshapen mess of woody stems. Last winter we thought the plant would never recover but after a spring spruce-up and feed, it came back to life slowly as it has done each year, and the essential oils in its leaves continue to give off an intense lemony fragrance as you brush past it throughout the summer. This big pot is accompanied at the moment by ginger lilies like Hedychium densiflorum 'Assam Orange' whose four-inch orange flowers have just appeared. These positively glow in the intense early autumn sunlight and are wonderfully fragrant too. There are plenty of different agapanthus in pots as well, the current favourite being A. 'Windsor Grey' which we first spotted in Graham Gough's inspirational nursery in Sussex. We waited a couple of years for this plant, and oh, it was worth it. Strong sturdy stems with sensational grey/blue flowers which last for weeks. I've often thought that the anticipation of having something is better than the owning of it but in this case, it's not. Well, not for the plantaholic, that is.

Pots are what you make of them as, of course, the plants in them are totally dependent on you for nourishment and care. This can be a drawback with the busy lifestyles that so many people have these days but they are worth it as long as you can find a pot-sitter when you want to go away for a few days.

Historically pots and containers have been around for centuries. The Romans adopted their ideas for pot and greenhouse cultivation from the Greeks and they used both large terracotta pots and wooden boxes as we do today. There are the remains of greenhouses in the ruins of Pompeii. One of the first Mediterranean plants mentioned in historical documents, which were grown as pot plants in Europe, was rosemary - a symbol of love and friendship - and, of course, citrus plants in pots have been cultivated for centuries. They originated in the warmer parts of Western Asia where they made their way to Europe via Persia and on to Greece. The trading routes bringing in spices and other highly desirable and exotic produce also brought plants from the East to those in Europe who could afford them. A lot of these ended up in specially constructed wooden sheds which eventually became constructions of iron and glass to provide winter protection. Covetable exotic plants ended up in orangeries in palaces like Versailles and fabulous glass houses on estates such as Chatsworth.

You can grow just about anything in a pot but not necessarily indefinitely. Vigorous plants need to be re-potted regularly so that they don't become pot-bound with their roots desperate to escape. So the thing is to know what your plants need and it helps to know what sort of conditions they would have experienced in the wild. Find out where they come from, which is an interesting project in itself. Mediterranean plants which you see growing happily on, say, rocky outcrops on a Greek island with very little soil, require lots of gritty soil and not too much water. Their leaves, often grey or silver and often hairy, have specially developed so that very little moisture is lost from them by transpiration. All containers need good drainage so a good base of grit, broken crocks or something similar before planting, is essential. Added grit in the compost aids drainage too.

Container plants can be used to create a garden where there is no soil - on balconies, down side alleyways in terraced houses, often ideal for shady foliage plants or like a friend in London, whose Notting Hill basement area houses an exquisite collection of species camellias. Or like Helmut and Cornelia Steffen who garden in a hundred metre square area of gravel courtyard outside a stable conversion in Sussex, proving that you can create the most intimate and personal garden using pots of all sizes and shapes (main image, previous page). Their creation is inspiring. They have high walls on either end of this plot and the wind created by the walls and the mature trees beyond creates a vortex which whooshes through their plants. So they've got plants in pots that protect those that are more fragile and less able to cope with this exposure. Over two hundred plants in pots are lovingly tended by Cornelia on a daily basis. She brought some of them over from Germany twenty years ago in a rented vehicle with extra large windows so that her beloved plants wouldn't have to spend any time cooped up in the dark of a standard removal truck! Well, they've paid her back, giving years of pleasure and forming the basis for this fabulous garden. She has created a sense of rhythm with having some plants in pairs. I particularly liked the sense of drama provided by two giant phormiums in huge containers on either side of one of the seating areas. Huge palms and tall bamboos provide shelter and create structure. Some plants are grown to remind the Steffens of Italy where they have family connections. There are climbers including the evergreen and fragrant C. armandii, standard balls of fragrant Trachelospermum jasminoides which were hit hard by the vagaries of last winter but which have come back to life and are flowering again. There are succulents, grasses and ferns in the shade created by the bamboos (Phyllostachys aurea). On my visit it was difficult to know where to look next as this haven is pretty inspirational. I liked the way that self-seeding plants like the ponytail grass, Stipa tenuissima, and Verbena bonariensis are taking advantage of the gravel to spread themselves around, and in the case of the verbena to soften the edges of the pot garden. Paths have been created between the pots but there is a huge feeling of connection to the plants as it is hard to walk through them without touching their foliage. Each spring, the pots have the top four inches of soil removed and replaced with fresh soil. I thought a good tip was the layer of sharp sand that always goes in a pot before planting. The plants are regularly fed with MiracleGro and are testament to its efficacy in that the cosmos have reached heights of seven feet! The Steffens also have a collection of kugels, or gazing balls or rose balls which are large glass balls in different colours placed amongst the plants to reflect light and create points of interest.

So you can create your own pot or container garden using any number of containers. Frost-resistant terracotta, of course, is ideal but collect interesting tins or galvanised buckets, or, on a smaller scale, old airbricks to cram full of succulents like houseleeks - anything with drainage holes in the bottom that you like the look of. This year we've tried a water garden in an old copper using just one small rose-pink water lily - no drainage holes in that, of course. How pretty it is.

Finally, I have to own up that there is a discarded galvanised water tank out in the woods which is just longing to be collected and re-born as a container full of favourite things. How to get it home is causing sleepless nights...

Sue Whigham can be contacted on 07810 457948 for gardening advice and the sourcing and supplying of interesting garden plants.