Perfectly easy plants for pots – Brilliant for tiny gardens

It’s great when you’ve got a massive garden. You can site your chiminea, fire pit or pizza oven in any number of locations without having to think too hard. But when your garden is tiny, or you have a small city patio, your options are often limited. You want space for a chiminea or whatever, but you also want lots of glorious greenery and blooms. Luckily you can plant up pots with flowers and greenery, which you can move around with ease… which means there’s more choice of places to put your chiminea. You can shift it in or out of the sunshine or shadow, move it to the centre of your space, or put it somewhere less windy, moving your plant pots around to give you the space you need. Here’s some fun advice about awesome plants for pots.

Cool plants for pots – Grow your own pomegranate

The pomegranate is a native of hot, dry places like Iran, north India, South Asia and the Mediterranean region, and also thrives in California and Arizona. But they’re easy to grow here too, in a pot. Germinate a handful of pomegranate seeds indoors, on your windowsill, and they’ll eventually grow into a beautiful bush with long, sharp spines and bright green leaves. It’s an evergreen, and it’ll hold onto its leaves as long as you bring the pot indoors through the autumn and winter. Otherwise they’ll drop off and re-grow in spring. We keep ours in the conservatory over winter.

Grow your own dragon fruit cactus

Have you ever eaten a Dragon Fruit? Yum! Better still, the seeds are really easy to grow, and grow fast into the most amazing cactus plant. Again they need to come indoors for the winter, and while they don’t like being both wet and cold, they don’t mind just cold – after all, deserts are often extremely cold after dark.

Super-easy, long-lasting nasturtiums

Grab one packet of nasturtium seeds. Sow them. Now you’ve got literally years of gorgeous flowers to enjoy, profusions of them in reds and golds and yellows, oranges and browns. Better still you can eat the tender new leaves, which taste peppery and strong, a fantastically hot addition to a summer salad. They’ll flower non-stop from late spring to the first frost, and because they self-seed it’ll happen all over again next year.

Supermarket olive trees

Olives are evergreens, well suited to garden or container cultivation. They sometimes produce fruit in mild regions and in particularly warm British summers. An olive tree used to be a seriously exotic and expensive thing. Now you can pick a little one up for a tenner or so at the supermarket, and they make exceptional trees for pots. Olives really dislike having wet feet so add 20% horticultural grit to improve the drainage. Place the pot somewhere sunny and keep it moist through the growing season, feeding it once a month, and don’t let the soil totally dry out in winter.

Create a profusion of glorious flowers

The best way to make a stunning display in pots is to go for the flowers, something that’ll also help you attract beneficial insects. The most popular pot flowers include marigolds and petunias, verbena, zinnia, and busy lizzies, but that’s just for a start – here are some more:

• African daisy
• Begonia
• Geranium
• Foxglove
• Tulips and daffs for spring bulb colour
• Impatiens
• Dianthus
• Azalea
• Lavatera
• Chrysanthemums
• Dahlia
• Pansy
• Sunflowers

Evergreen shrubs for year-round colour

Plenty of our customers like to eat and play outdoors all year round, and that means all-year colour. How about evergreens? Ivy is gorgeous, available in all sorts of decorative colours including vivid yellow and variegated. Euonymus fortunei has lovely variegated leaves, pittosporum is an elegant evergreen shrub, and skimmia japonica comes with glossy evergreen leaves and bright red buds through winter, which open to pale pink flowers in spring. They all grow well in containers. As does heuchera, a beautiful evergreen perennial which has the most amazing coloured leaves, everything from variegated pink and yellow to peach, scarlet, bright pink and the deepest burgundy. Last but not least if you have a permanently shady or dappled shade spot, potted ferns look stunning.

Have you invested in a chiminea yet?

Investing in a chiminea, firebowl or pizza oven means investing in summers of fun! Take a look at our enormous range and see what will suit your outdoor space best…