How to Create a Lovely Autumn Container

To keep the colour going on your patio involves planning ahead. After all, while my fuchsia, penstemon, achillea and salvias are still flowering their socks off, I know that once the frost strikes it’s going to be ‘curtains’ for a lot of that colour. I need a lovely Autumn container. Something which will pick up the baton and keep my patio looking stellar ideally through Winter too.

So I’ve devised a new Autumn container for my patio. But before I share it, let’s have a quick look at design rules for container planting.

Autumn Container – the Rules

As someone who hates rules, I’m pleased to say, there aren’t too many of them. Actually there are five design rules that really matter when planting any container or pot.

Be Generous

Pack your Autumn container with plants. It’s not like a flowerbed where you need to be really disciplined and give plants plenty of room to expand and grow. In a container you want instant impact. I want my planters to look good immediately. So allow a couple of inches around the plants for expansion but not much more.

Obviously later down the line, if the plants are overcrowded, I will move them elsewhere, giving them space, so that they stay healthy and thrive. But for now, I need ‘wow.’

Think Three

You can of course fill an Autumn container with a single plant or type of plant. However, if you are not adopting this approach, I’d recommend you have three types of plants in your container – thrillers, spillers and fillers!

For a colourful Autumn container you need something which grows vertically – this creates the ‘wow’ factor, that’s your thriller. You then need one that spills dramatically over the side of your container, to take the eye down. Last come your filler plants. Plants which plug the gaps.

Thirds/Two-Thirds

This rule is a bit mathsy – so stick with me. I’ve read that to get the proportions right, you need to think third/two-thirds. In essence your Autumn container, once planted up, needs to either equate to one-third or two-thirds of the eventual total height of the container and the plants together. The plants making up the remaining two-thirds or one-third. For instance, if you’ve a container that’s two foot tall, you need plants which will either grow just a foot tall (so the container = two-thirds of the total) or plants which will eventually grow four feet tall (so the whole display is 6 foot in total with the container = one third).

Colour – Complement or Opposites

When it comes to colours for your Autumn container you want to either select plants where the colours are very close to each other on the colour wheel – such as white and silver plants, or oranges and reds. Or go for colour opposites – such as purple and yellow or orange and blue.

My Autumn Container

Ok, so if those are the rules, what plants am I going to use in my Autumn container? Colour-wise I am going for opposite colours – a pinkish purple and lime green.

Plant #1 A Grass

For vertical height and movement I’m going for Poa Labillardierei. As those who follow my blog will know, I’m a huge fan of foliage plants and grasses often top my list. (See my top ten foliage plants) So I love an excuse to add a new grass to my collection! And this is one I don’t already have. It is a semi ever-green grass with lovely slender slightly limey blue-green leaves which grow up to 60cm long. It has sprays of purplish flowers in mid summer, but by then I will have probably lifted it from my pot and popped it into a border.

Plant #2 – Skimmia

Skimmias are a classic plant at this time of year, but rather than going for a female Skimmia Japonica with red berries (which you see all over garden centres at the moment) I’ve gone for the male Skimmia Finchy. This is a gorgeous compact, ever green shrub which has lovely slightly lime green flower buds in Winter which will open to creamy scented flowers in Spring – perfect as that’s another time when much of the garden lacks interest. So this plant will be very handy then too!

Autumn Container Plant #3 – Heather

Heather is a brilliant plant – I love it! However, it needs ericaceous soil – and my garden isn’t at all acid. So I can’t grow heathers in my flower beds. However, I can of course control the soil conditions in a pot and so am grabbing my Autumn planter as an excuse to have heather. The heather I’m going for is pinky purple Calluna vulgaris garden girls. Now I can sense what you’re thinking…”Louise those other plants in your container aren’t acid-loving.” I know, I know! But, like Baldrick, I’ve a cunning plan. I’m going to plant out the heather in a pot that’s full of ericaceous compost and then plant that pot in my larger container full of normal peat-free compost. ‘Simples’ – as an annoying TV meerkat would say!

Plant #4 – Ivy

The final plant for my Autumn container is the spiller – and that’s good old ivy. I’ve gone for a variegated one. I think it will look less dense in the whole display, and the young leaves are slightly lime green which works with my colour scheme.

Why this combination for my Autumn Container?

Obviously there are other plant combinations you could go for. So why have I chosen these? Well, my thinking is that a lot of the plants in this combination will continue working from late Winter well into the Spring. The grass, ivy and Skimmia will still be lovely then, and as I’m keeping the heathers in pots within the container, I’ll be able to easily lift them, once their flowering is completed, and put them in a smaller trough on their own.

I’ll replace the heathers with further white planting – perhaps hellebores with limey yellow centres.

So the pot will be an lovely pinky purple and lime green container in Autumn, and then it will become a more subtle container featuring greens, lime green and whites in Spring.

As you can see – when it comes to containers, I’m always planning ahead!

So that’s it – all that remains is for me to give you the big reveal. So here it is! Hope you like it!!