Recipe: 3 ivy geranium, 3 Marguerite sweet potato vine, 1 sun coleus (24-36 inches tall)
I’ve worked on this pot for several years. It originally started in a whiskey barrel at my old house and went through several incarnations before I came up with something I was happy with. It’s my contention that it takes at least three years to come up with a combination that I really like and actually works together. Sometimes things that look good together don’t grow well together. They might have different sun requirements, water needs or fertilizer needs. One might grow faster, overshadowing another or it might just be simple user error. I put in too much of one plant and not enough of another. I just keep tweaking until I get something that works and appeals to me.
That’s what happened when I stumbled on to this mix. I had the sweet potato vine and the ivy geraniums for years. I just wasn’t getting the third plant right. I tried snapdragons, petunias and regular geraniums. It wasn’t until the larger sun coleus showed up at my garden center that I got this combination to work.
What I like about this combination is that it looks good almost immediately (this picture taken about a month after planting) and just keeps getting better and better throughout the summer. The sweet potato vine grows down to cover the pot, the coleus gets up to 3 feet tall (make sure you choose the tallest variety you can find) and the ivy geraniums bloom all summer.
The beauty of this design is in the variety of the ivy geraniums and coleus. I started with the ivy geranium because I fell in love with the Global Merlot (a beautiful burgundy flower) but you could also start with the coleus. Putting a pot together is not unlike putting an outfit together. Each plant plays off the other. Since I started with the Global Merlot, I looked for a coleus that meshed with the burgundy and also had some lime green in the leaves. This way the coleus, in addition to being the focal point of the container, ties together the geranium and the Marguerite sweet potato vine.
This container is a good example of basic container design. There is the focal point that goes up (coleus), the filler plant or spreading plant (ivy geranium), and the trailing plant (sweet potato vine). Or as I like to say, up, out, down. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
1 comment:
your posts always make me want to go garden. After the painting, of course. Next spring? Until then, write a lot, I've got to live vicariously.
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