Last weekend, Bradley took me to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens (free admission with our season pass to the Smith Gilbert Gardens!) It is so beautiful there, and I can’t wait to go back. Throughout the gardens, there were containers with beautiful blooms that made my few little containers at home seem even more sad. I don’t give them the attention they need, so everything I have put in them either dies or takes over.
Trying to follow the rule of ‘thriller, filler and spiller’, I originally had some tall perennials and Dianthus and Stonecrop. Eventually, the tall perennial was replaced with a Dwarf Alberta Spruce for year-round impact, but the Dianthus and Stonecrop took over. I ended up moving the stonecrop to the rock wall on the hill.
Also, My clay pots started breaking because of water getting in between the layers and expanding during our freezing cold winter. I replaced them with a couple of light-weight styrofoam ones. While I was at it, I trimmed back the Dianthus and split it between the two pots for filler. In the larger container, I used Golden Globes Lisimaquia as my spiller. In the smaller container, I planted a Sky Pencil Holly for a thriller and used Bacopa as the spiller.
In the third pot, I have a yellow mum from last fall that sprouted back out this spring with purple Petunias. The beautiful deep purple calla lily that was originally there did not survive it’s second winter unfortunately.
I’m not a maintainer, which is why I usually research options for our yard that are low maintenance and drought tolerant. I like having container gardens on our patio, but I am going to have to be better about keeping up with them. In a small pot, I planted a coral-colored Geranium and some more Petunias:
While I was searching for new container plants, I came across the clearance section at WalMart. I picked up two Asiatic Lilies that I installed under the dogwood tree, and a few more Speedwell ‘Georgia Blue’ that I plugged in along the retaining wall to help fill in some gaps. Lastly, I moved the Lamb’s Ear again. I love them when they are small and cute, but I just haven’t figured out what to do with them. Where they were, the sun shone on them all day and they had gotten enormous and washed out. I moved them to the corner in front of our air conditioning unit in which we have given up trying to grow grass.
Bless the mess! They will be very shaded there – hopefully they will behave more like this little guy that has stayed mostly shaded, and is still small and cute. I am making all kinds of assumptions about this purely on what I see.
And for fun, here is one of the blackberries I planted last year:
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