I’ve been thinking about plant pots a lot recently. Those flower pots specifically, the ones with Appleford Pottery roll stamped around the rim, made in the dusty, red clay-stained workshop on the farm where I grew up. My father’s pots.
This week we submitted our Beautiful Border – A Corner of the Potter’s Yard. A family venture playing to our strengths: project management, forward momentum, and an eye for plant combinations (my mother); beautifully rendering plants, paths and pots on paper, watercolours and patience (my father), and folder organisation, formatting word documents and the odd bit of writing (me).
The border took shape among the pots in response to ‘Once Upon a Time’, the competition’s theme this year. A half-remembered feature of my childhood summers, a collection of flower pots atop the display stand at plant fairs across the county, playing in the heat among the shrubberies of country houses with other semi-feral children.
Reimagined today, the display stand, aged and askew, takes centre-stage, covered in pots overflowing with herbs and perennials. The surrounding planting reflects a wilder style, as if untouched for years and left to self-seed. The remains of a long-dry pond dips away from the path edge with a tumbling fountain of broken pot shards.
An exercise in less is more, the first planting plans crammed in cultivars, favourites from all over, loosely united over a preference for well-drained soil and sunshine. Oranges and butter yellows with apricot, bronze, lilac, taupe, it made little sense, and the pot plants were lost in the mash of palettes.
Several mood boards later and a coherent group of 10, quickly culled to 9 plants emerged. Small wafts of Foeniculum vulgare ‘Smoky’ would weave through small clumps of acid toned yellows and greens, mounding Salvia officinalis ‘Icterina’ and Santolina rosmarinifolia ‘Lemon Fizz’ given height with Nepeta govaniana. Oreomecon ‘Moondance’ and sprawling patches of thyme encroach and soften the rough course grit beneath, and through grasses there’s sight of the display stand, a riot of reds and oranges. Sprawling nasturtiums, sprays of millet and Scabiosa atropurpurea ‘Chile Black’ will glow above the green.
We are still awaiting the decision, but either way I’m proud of what we’ve achieved – a winning combination of plants, drawings and a well-organised Google Drive.
a year in the garden 