Container Gardening

Rapidly becoming a major trend in the gardening world today is the Tuscan garden capturing the beautiful, old world style of gardening. An especially important aspect of a Tuscan-style garden is using containers among the different flowers, trees and shrubs. In order to have a flourishing garden, you must choose the proper type of gardening container to do the most efficient job.

Large objects like urns placed among shrubbery, flowers and trees make ideal focal points and lovely gardening accessories. The use of at least some form of pottery is essential in composing your Tuscan garden. You can choose from large ornate Grecian style urns to simple terra cotta pots. Perhaps you want to use several clumped together, some planted with others empty. Many gardeners like to achieve a more collaborative feel in their own Tuscan garden opting to incorporate several containers.

There are a multitude of options. Have fun mixing the color, texture, and size with the individual plants either contained in the pot or surrounding it. You can be dramatic using contrast or subtle using similar colors. When choosing colors for each gardening container you should remember that the basic color scheme for a Tuscan garden consists of warm, earthy colors such as brown, rusty reds, bright yellow, orange, and deep blues.

When planting in a container, make sure that it has enough drainage holes so that the health of your plants will not be at risk. From any number of varieties of vessels available to plant your plants, it is best to save the ones with smaller necks just for decoration because the plant has difficulty expanding in these quarters unless it is a single small tree in which the urn’s neck would support only the base of a trunk. If a plant grows with long and trailing vines select a container that is tall to accommodate this. When planting succulents or shallow rooted plants, wide low containers will be appropriate.
Mix and match the colors of the pots with the color theme of your plantings. Mix the textures on the containers. Some can be of a high glaze and others can be terra cotta or have an old world quality, and perhaps add a few with Tuscan scenes painted on them to accentuate the feeling.

A way to alter the mood or tone of your Tuscan garden is to change the arrangement of the containers. The containers should be moveable, so this transformation can be made easily and efficiently. Keeping this in mind, you might want to place some of the heavy, larger containers on low, inconspicuous trolleys. Imagine: you will be able to wheel your garden around and change it whenever you want. This also makes it possible to change the conditions of your plantings will receive. Perhaps they will perform better in one location than in another – one of the great conveniences of container gardening. Another advantage is that you can continue to grow your plants indoors when the colder whether starts to hit your area, more or less, moving the outdoors to the indoors.

Dayelle Swensson is an avid writer for the web on a number of topics. Having gardened herself for many years, she is able to advise others about a variety of things including gardening tips, lawn and tree care, watering, hose reel and keeping your home garden looking good and healthy.