Robbins Roanne - Continuous container gardens: swap in the plants of the season to create fresh designs year-round

CONTINUOUS CONTAINER GARDENS

Photography by John Gruen

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publishing practical information that encourages
personal independence in harmony with the environment.

Edited by Carleen Madigan
Art direction and book design by Mary Winkelman Velgos
Text production by Jennifer Jepson Smith
Photography by John Gruen
Indexed by Christine R. Lindemer, Boston Road Communications

2010 by Sara Begg Townsend and Roanne Robbins

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Townsend, Sara Begg.
Continuous container gardens / by Sara Begg Townsend and Roanne Robbins.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-60342-702-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Container gardening. I. Robbins, Roanne. II. Title.
SB418.T69 2011
635.986dc22

2010030123

To DaveSBT

To Ken, Nora, and my familyRR

There are many people to thank in a project such as this. First, thank you to all of the garden owners who were so kind and generousletting us traipse through their gardens each season in pursuit of the perfect photo. They are Celeste and Jack Penney; Liz Coxe; Virginia and David Merriman; Nancy Hemenway and Ellen Langer; Janet Hadley; Gary and Sue Hanson; Maida, Adam, Prosper, Oscar, and Violet van Dale; and the Little Compton Historical Society. We are grateful to a number of plantspeople for their support of this book: Wayne Mezzitt and Weston Nurseries; Rick Peckham; Leslie and Peter Van Berkum; Tony Elliot; Neil Van Sloun and Sylvan Nursery; Chris Faria and Jim Glover. Were also grateful to Heather Quinlan, Lexy Wright, and Sandy Barrett.

Our thanks to Beth LeComte for all of her awesome help before, during, and after the photo shoots and to Brian and Liz Viera, who saved our backs by letting us use their lift-gate truck. Thank you to our fantastic photographer, John Gruen, who was always a delight to work with and who always came prepared with a stream of movie quotes and entertaining voicemail messages from his son Ben. We thank our editor, Carleen Madigan, whose enthusiasm, patience, and clear mind made the whole thing fun. And finally we thank our families for supporting us during the last year as we ran around buying plants, planting them, photographing them, moving them, and then writing about them. Thank you all!

SOME GARDENING friends once said to me, while I was bemoaning the small size of my new garden, that in many ways a smaller garden is better than a large one. A small garden has the potential to inspire more creativity because it allows the gardener to focus on less and to really perfect it.

This could not be truer for container gardens. The smallness of the container enables me to explore plants and to experiment with new designs. It also allows me to take very good care of my plants; after all, deadheading a container garden takes about 30 seconds, especially if its done a couple of times a week.

I love the way container gardens bring the garden right up close. I always make sure that at least two of my containers are somewhere along my daily route, whether thats to and from the compost pile or near the path from the house to the sidewalk. After all, how often do you really get down (or up close) and notice the detailed intricacies of a plantthe soft fuzz of a wild ginger (Asarum canadense), the strange but magical colors and patterns on a new barrenwort (Epimedium) leaf, the breaking bud of a magnolia, or the sweet, unexpected fragrance of a species clematis? It is this level of immersion that we recommend for the maximum enjoyment of the world of plants. It makes your garden a much richer place to be and reminds us of the role each plant plays in the larger garden picture.

Even though Roanne and I both have gardens, we also love trying out new things in containers. I often plant single-specimen containers and mass the pots together. I like being able to protect new, delicate (and sometimes expensive) plants in a container. By planting up single specimens, I get to see if a given plant will do well in a container on its own; if it does, I can include it in a mixed container like the ones we show in this book.

Roanne is truly a master with color; shell pick a color palette to work with and then push it to the limit in a container. And if she likes it, shell put it in her own mixed border on a bigger scale, weaving annuals, perennials, and shrubs all together in ways that would never occur to me to try in the border but that look amazing. We should all strive for that boldnessboth in a container and in the garden.

Container gardening provides a venue in which you can push the seasons. Walking out your front door on a cool March day and having a container filled with cheery yellow miniature daffodils and grape hyacinths at your feet is like being filled up with a warm, golden ray of happiness. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I live, theres no way those bulbs would be up in the garden that early in the year.

Using containers enables us also to push the cultural limits of plants, particularly their soil and light requirements. For example, our spring underplanting for the birch (Betula Little King) included a catmint (Nepeta Little Titch). Typically, a catmint wouldnt be paired with a woodsy, edge-habitat-loving tree like a birch. The birch loves humus-y, moist soil and can take part shade. The catmint? Not so much. He prefers quick-draining soil and pretty much full sun. But... we saw this plant at the nursery and it looked so good, so crisp, just the right colors and textures, that we risked it any-how. We could have left it in the container through the summer to continue providing that great texture and blue-green color, but figured that the plant would have taken much longer to regain its former glory once we planted it out into the garden. Its a trade-off, like many things, so we swapped it out during the next seasonal planting.