Which conatainer combo do you like best?

last year

Hello all, I just purchased these cute copper pots and I'm playing with plant combos for them for indoor pots. Here are a few choices I came up with and wanted to get some feedback/votes on them.

Which container combo is your favorite?

Featured Answer

tapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a)

last year

Wider pots are much more often than not, difficult to grow in. If a grower finds it necessary to increase the volume of grow medium as a way to provide additional room for further root colonization, deeper is better unless the medium holds very little or no perched water. This still holds true even if the grower harbors and adheres to the belief that in situ plants considered to be habitual growers of shallow root systems necessarily need or even a shallow pot when grown in containers, a horticultural myth.

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Comments (7)

KW PNW Z8
last year
C But, depends on room it will live in. For my Great Room I’dchoose A
tapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a)
last year
It will undoubtedly boil down to primarily personal preference, but here are the reasons I like B. 1) it provides the most textural contrast. 2) All the plants will thrive in a fast draining, well-aerated medium. 3) It does not include parlor palm, which is quite susceptible to mealybug and scale unless it it kept at the peak of vitality (health); and, it does not contain Hedera (ivy), which is pretty much a mite magnet indoors.

Any time there is more than a single plant in a single pot, competition between the plants is a given. It comes part and parcel with any planting that contains more than 1 plant, whether they are of a single or different species. If we were to avoid competition between plants in a planting, we would necessarily have to limit every pot to a single pot. Even if each plant had it's own pot but was situated in a larger collective pot, there would still be competition because all resources that come from the soil would come from a soil mass that serves all the pots; and additionally, the roots would soon grow through drain holes into the common soil mass.

That's oregano ^^^ in the middle as the pots 'thriller'

The images above are a few of the many hundreds of mixed plantings I've put together over the years, and you can see they are all extremely healthy. I hope you find inspiration in some of the images. You can tell that most of these planting are fully mature, meaning the entire soil mass is colonized by roots. Many images were taken in August and September, yet the plants are still flourishing, so there really isn't much of a competition for resources that limits the amount of biomass a given volume of soil can produce in a growing season. Whether a single plant or a dozen, you'll end up with very close to the same amount of plant mass produced by a given volume of soil, as long as you don't shoot yourself in the foot by adopting erratic or inappropriate watering practices, or mix plants together that have widely varying moisture needs; but even at that, I have grown perfectly healthy portulacaria (mini jade/ elephant bush), coleus, fuchsia, and hibiscus, all in the same pot (just to prove a point) using a highly aerated fast draining grow medium. One would think these plants could never be mixed, given the disparity in their light and moisture wants, but that thought would be wrong.

Even though copper is essential to normal growth in minute quantities, if the pot truly is copper or copper plated, I would be more concerned about a copper toxicity than mixing the plants, not withstanding what I initially said about eye appeal and the potential problems that border on being baked into the cake if the planting is to be kept indoors.

Al
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andersons21
last year
Gorgeous!

Al, what is the plant in the blue ceramic pot with the frog figure, near the front with chartreuse leaves and tall spikes with pink/red berries? My neighbor gave me a couple cuttings, but she doesn't know what it is.
floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK
last year
That’s Talinum paniculatum.
tapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a)
last year
Commonly - Jewels of Opar. It works well in pots, but it's probably something you wouldn't want to let loose in your garden or beds. It's a tender perennial (a perennial that dies back from exposure to freezing temperatures) that easily returns (from seed) over a wider area in subsequent years. It likes a well-drained medium or soil and is agreeable with being kept on the dry side. I've been planning on using it in Kusamono plantings, but just haven't got around to it. It's widely available in spring as a bedding or filler plant in cell packs or at any time from seeds. The foliage is said to be edible, but it's never yet quite made it to our dinner table.

Al
tapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a)
last year
@andersons21 - 2 days after I wrote my last post - guess what I found?

One of the plants you inquired after! I haven't used it in a container in more than 10 years, but all of a sudden, one lonely volunteer pops its head up out of the garden for a look/see. I dug it up and potted it up, but I waited until I knew it wasn't going to croak on me. It took off like it was never uprooted and transplanted into a pot. Hopefully it will set seed before fall's end so I won't have to buy seeds for my next project using it.

Al