Gardens
Gone to pot
Ursula Buchan
Aa young child, my favourite, indeed I should think my only, party-piece was a recitation of that piece of doggerel 'For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost .. .' I enjoyed the sense of gathering doom but, even more, I was fascinated (although I may not have expressed myself quite like this at the time) by the way some small incident can detonate a chain reaction of events of greater and greater consequence.
The contemporary vogue for 'container gardening' reminds me of that verse, except that in this case the consequences have been largely salutary, rather than wholly disastrous. What started as an insignificant trend in garden design, triggered by an increasing interest in Mediterranean gar- dens amongst a few sophisticated garden- ers, has, in the last five years, grown enough to alter the look of millions of gar- dens in this country.
(I won't treat you to a paragraph on my feelings about the word `container'; some word, however ugly, is necessary as a col- lective noun for tubs, barrels, urns, vases, pots, baskets, hanging or otherwise, and windowboxes, and there is an end to it.) The smallest, but by no means insignifi- cant, consequence is that a variety of previ- ously unfashionable plants (unfashionable because they were killed by frost), known as 'tender perennials', are now widely grown. The tribe of marguerites (Argyran- themum) are probably the best known, but scaveolas, trailing helichrysum, tender con- volvulus and many other plants that no one had ever heard of before, are now the com- mon coinage of the dimmest garden centre. Nearly all are decorative and positive addi- tions to our gardens. Each year, the seeds- men and nurseries offer even more unusual plants which they swear will grow in a bas- ket or a pot. Anything with a droopy habit is a potential winner.
In the past, tender perennials (where they were grown at all) were propagated each autumn, by cuttings, to size them down so that there was room for them under glass during the winter. For many people, nowadays, this is impossible but, because of the keen interest in container gardening, a substantial trade in small root- ed cuttings has grown up. These the gar- dener can buy in the spring, and simply pot up and grow on.
The same is true of tender annuals, or what are loosely called 'bedding plants'. To get the best flowering in containers, you need large, sturdy plants to plant out in them by May. Nurserymen are better at achieving this than most gardeners, espe- cially in the cases of lobelia and pelargoni- um which need to be germinated 'in heat' in late winter. So fewer and fewer people bother to sow their own seeds of tender annuals, and instead order seedlings and seed-raised small plants (often called `starter plants' or 'plugs') which are deliv- ered in spring. That way they are already past the most dangerous stage of their exis- tence and will happily grow larger on a windowsill until the frosts are over.
Both these developments are in accor- dance with the spirit of the age. If you have long since stopped making your own jam, why should you continue to preserve your own plants, particularly when the nurseries, like the supermarkets, can provide them more cheaply and just when you want them.
The range of varieties which are avail- able as young plants is far narrower than that of seeds in packets. The choice is often limited to the newer, more 'compact' vari- eties, which have been bred to suit contain- ers (another important consequence of the raised profile of pot gardening). This level- ling down is balanced by the fact that gar- den centres now group plants for sale, which will go together happily in a contain- er. 'Recipe' gardening books have promot- ed this. So, although your choice of container plant may be more limited, you are likely to make a better fist of the colour combinations.
Gardening habits, particularly in propa- gation, have changed and there is no rea- son to think this change temporary. But the biggest impact which pot gardening has had is not on what we buy but who buys it. A great many people, who previously counted themselves out of the gardening lark because they did not possess an inch of workable soil at ground level, or who thought macro-gardening a tiring bore, have taken to growing plants: on balconies, on steps, on paving or on walls. They have joined the gang and a good thing too.
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