Create a four-season color pot - flower pot arrangements

Sunset, Fall-Winter, 1996

Like fireworks, most pots full of flowers are designed for a quick, spectacular show, lasting only one season. But if you're willing to move beyond convention, you can plant now for great splashes of color through all four seasons, from this fall and winter (even in mild parts of the Northwest) through next spring and summer - all in one pot.

The secret is simple. Build your design around an arrangement of permanent small shrubs, grasses, and trailing plants, then fill in with annuals, perennials, and bulbs that bloom in different seasons.

Choose plants whose flower and foliage colors and textures combine well. The container pictured at right was planted for a single color scheme through four seasons in Northern California. The effect is even more spectacular when you cluster several such containers.

It takes large pots - at least 14 inches deep and 16 inches across - to make year-round container plantings successful.

Plastic containers are probably the best buy, since they're relatively light and inexpensive. In frost-prone areas, avoid containers made from clay; they're heavy and expensive, and frost can make them crack.

You can design most of your four-season container garden right in the nursery when you shop. Start by choosing the tallest specimen in your arrangement, then bring in trailing plants to cascade over the pot's sides and smaller shrubs to act as a foil for annuals. Plant things shoulder to shoulder, but leave pockets for annuals.

CHANGE FLOWERS WITH THE SEASONS

Because seasonal annuals provide the color for these plantings, you replace them three or four times during the year.

Start at fall planting time by putting spring-flowering bulbs (daffodils or tulips, for example) under winter bedding plants such as pansies or ornamental kale. Around New Year's, you might replace the fall annuals with primroses; in early spring, pull out the primroses in favor of calendulas, English daisies, or wallflowers. Your last planting might be a summer selection of ageratum, geraniums, lobelia, marigolds, or petunias.

CARING FOR PLANTS

Since the success of four-season containers depends partly on permanent plants staying in scale, you should not feed them much: at most, mix a little controlled-release fertilizer into the lightweight potting mix at planting time. Pick off faded flowers and dead leaves to keep plants tidy.

Plants in containers are especially vulnerable to drying, so check them frequently year-round. If you get an extended frost and the soil shows any sign of freezing, move the containers into a garage or a cool but frost-free porch.

Because these containers are made to be in their prime for just a year, you can pull out permanent plants and put them in your garden or prune them and replant them in another four-season container.

RELATED ARTICLE: Pot rocks

After a weekend away, you return home to find that the cat used your potted palm as a rest room, or a squirrel buried nuts in the Japanese maple's container. The humane and handsome way to stop these intrusions: put rocks atop the soil in your big pots. Smooth river rocks (the kind used in ikebana) are sold at flower shops and import marts. You can pour water and liquid plant food through the rocks, and they're easy to move if they crowd the trunk or you want to change the soil.