Containers not by design

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m rubbish at design.  But, I keep trying to improve…

This year, I thought I would have some baskets at the front, full of the hot colours of red cascading geraniums, Begonia ‘Cascading Embers’, Fuchsia ‘Thalia’ and Surfinia petunia ‘Victorian Yellow’.  To cut a long and dismal story short, the plants were ordered, then lockdown stopped the shopping.  Trying to get mail order hanging baskets was a nightmare (presumably most of them come from China, also in lockdown at the time), and those that arrived had very little wire and enormous gaps in between, so planting through the sides wasn’t at all practical.

The baskets went into the shed, and the basket plants, now in burgeoning growth, were consigned to double fill eight containers that were meant to hold a calmer collection of whites and greens, pinks and purples, most of which were also in burgeoning growth.  All except for the Caladiums, which had, to a man, rotted.

Well, they’re all looking full of themselves now, even if not as planned.

This was a month or so ago.

And this is now.

Not showing to best advantage, I know, but they’re too heavy for me to heave around.  Crammed in there, we have unlikely bedfellows.  There’s Colocasia, with the large leaves; Zantedeschia ‘Picasso’, with the purple-throated white trumpets and spotted leaves; red balcon geraniums (the sort you get hanging from window boxes in Switzerland); surfinia petunia ‘Victorian Yellow’; the dark leaves and orange flowers of begonia ‘Cascading Embers’; fuchsia ‘Thalia’ with its red-accented leaves and emerging trumpets of scarlet-orange flowers; and fuchsia ‘Annabel’, just starting to open pink-tipped white flowers.

All things considered, I’m amazed they’ve grown as well as they have, the colocasia needing a lot of water to fuel those leaves, and the geraniums and petunias, not so much.  Hopefully, next year I’ll do better!

The weedy plant just behind is truly a weedy wildflower – ragwort.  I’ve left it there because the clumps of ragwort in the drive that are currently being consumed by Cinnabar moth caterpillars are now down to almost stumps.  I think I may have to move the starving hordes to another food plant, and this one is big enough to see them through.