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Tips for Making Container Gardens
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- Mix plants with at least three textures of foliage to make a container garden interesting.
- Use plenty of plants that are foliage plants (with no flowers) in your designs. In most cases, foliage color, leaf shape, and texture are just as important as the flowers themselves.
- Some good foliage contrasts would include: downy with glossy; dark with gray; small with large; yellow with violet.
- Use colorful foliage (like Coleus) to “echo” the color of flowers in the container.
- Vary the shape of the flowers in the container garden to add interest.
- Bicolor flowers are becoming more available and are great for color echoing.
- Sometimes you just have to do some “snipping and tucking” of faster growing plants when they are mixed in with slower growing ones. Otherwise, you will lose the slower ones and your design gets destroyed.
- Vegetative annuals mix well with other annuals, perennials, tropicals, and bulbs. Everything and anything goes as long as it is pleasing to the eye of your customer.
- Nothing lasts forever! Container gardens need to be gardened. Plants in container gardens need to be trimmed, dead-headed and replaced.
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| Grow-Together Combinations |
| Good to Use | Do Not Work Well |
| One vigorous foliage plant in the center | Growth retardants |
| Upright verbenas, double impatiens, geraniums | Rampant growers |
| Foliage plants for neutral color & texture | Tall plants |
| Summer bloomers for summer market | Slow growers |
| Plants with long necks | Creeping and very compact plants |
| Various textures and forms | Too many fine textures |
| Analogous color harmonies | Salmon with violet or fuchsia with bright red |
| Slight succession of bloom for earlier market | Extremes in bloom times |
| Odd numbers of plants | Only two plants of one species |
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