It isn’t always easy to get excited about gardening in the fall.
And yet pots and containers, more than anything else perhaps, need updating if we want to keep them around.
In search of inspiration, we visited Sunnyside Nursery in Marysville, where longtime owners Steve and Pauline Smith maintain an exquisite back yard full of ideas right next door.
Here’s what we learned:
Swap it out
Though summer-blooming containers can put on a wonderful show for months, they can look increasingly ratty as they run out of gas in the fall.
Sunnyside’s container goddesses, Sandy Milam and Mary Stole, offered a summer-to-fall container-transformation demonstration to prove the point.
Their summer container in need of renewal featured a pretty but overly bountiful display of million bells, which had grown out of proportion to twice the size of the pot. It was also home to a white verbena, which was starting to get leggy, a raggedy heuchera and, at the center, a permanent pillar of evergreen ilex crenata Sky Pencil.
To update the container, they replaced the million bells with a fresh installation of white bacopa for a less leggy, fresher look.
They swapped out the verbena with ruffled golden winter pansies, kissed with a touch of crimson.
Finally, they tidied up the maroon heuchera, removing spent flower spikes and trimming out dying leaves for a like-new appearance.
With the extra space that remained, they added a small tricolor hebe.
“People don’t have to throw out their summer containers,” Milam said. ”You can actually embellish for fall, creating something bigger and better.”
Add art
While deadheading mums and pinching back pansies will keep their flowers coming throughout fall, you might consider another source of color and light: Art.
In the Smiths’ garden, whimsical glass sculptures topped with globes rise from a pot filled with Japanese blood grass. They never fade or turn brown. In fact, they shine and sparkle no matter what, like permanent, bulletproof flowers.
In one mixed border, extra-large yet believable ceramic asparagus spears give visitors pause — and delight — without fail.
Try conifers
If you hate the idea of scuttling around in the fall rains to maintain your containers, consider conifers.
“Dwarf conifers create sculpture in the garden when used in containers or planted in the ground,” Milam said. “In winter, all you have to do is throw Christmas lights on.”
In the Smiths’ back yard, groups of containers, typically holding one conifer per pot, create vignettes worthy of year-round display.
Variations on shape, height and color of the plants give the feeling of a single display.
In one arrangement, all three pots are uniform in style and hue, creating a true ensemble, including a prostrate blue deodar cedar, a spiraled topiary juniper and a golden puffball of arborvitae Rheingold planted over a carpet of thick, black mondo grass.
For comic relief, a small blue-shelled glass snail makes its way along the cedar.
Use shrubs
Though annuals such as pansies are always in large supply at local nurseries in fall, don’t overlook shrubs.
Many dwarf evergreen varieties are now sold in 4-inch pots, the perfect size for plunking into containers. If they grow too large for your pot, simply plant them in the landscape.
Good container candidates from the shrub world, according to Milam and Stole, include dwarf English boxwood, euphorbia efanthia, Quicksilver hebe, Lemon Beauty lonicera and Mardi Gras abelia.
If you need something tall in your pot to create a pillar-filler-spiller aesthetic, you can go for the classic feathery appearance of the neon-green Wilma Goldcrest variety of Monterey cypress or a blue variation on the look with the Ellwood’s Pillar variety of Port Orford cedar.
Cull from the yard
If your fall container gardening budget is unfortunately zero, don’t worry. There’s hope if you have evergreen plants somewhere in your yard or neighborhood.
Simply snip branches of holly, cedar or even Douglas fir and insert their cut ends creatively into the soil in your pots. Greens with fall berries can offer added interest.
Some greens can last all winter in the cold and damp. Just be sure to keep pots moist until consistent fall rains arrive.
If you’re lucky enough to have cuttings from a red twig dogwood, curly willow or other deciduous plant with interesting naked foliage, you can do the same thing.
Those sticks may even decide to put out roots, giving you new plants come spring
Four for fall
Orange Rocket barberry: Barberry bushes, though spiky with thorns, add rich fall color in the garden, especially this upright red-orange variety. They’re also hardy, said Sandy Milam of Sunnyside Nursery in Marysville: “We didn’t lose any of them in the winter.”
Parrotia persica: This lesser-known small tree, also known as Persian ironwood, works well in smaller yards and it features multicolored leaves in autumn. “This will put on the most spectacular fall color show you have ever seen,” Milam said. “Then, when it’s bare, it has really nice, interesting structure.”
Diamond Frost euphorbia: This little annual, hardy to at least 40 degrees, is not your garden-variety euphorbia. Like a more elegant cousin of bacopa, it features tiny green leaves and clouds of wispy, airy white flowers, an ideal filler or spiller for containers in need of a temporary boost.
Painted heather: If you want an over-the-top color pop in your containers, you might try painted heather, literally spray painted with a vegetable-based dye that washes off eventually, leaving you with a regular, white-blooming heather.
Top tool
Longtime nursery woman Sandy Milam’s new No. 1 tool for updating a container is a garden knife from Oxo, which features serrated sides that are ideal for cutting through roots packed in containers.
Though many gardeners have high-end Japanese garden knives known as hori hori, ergonomically minded Oxo recently released its own rust-proof, stainless steel, Good Grips version for $24.99. See your local nursery or www.oxo.com for more information.
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