My Garden Plan: Growing Perennials in Containers

4/8/2013

I really love winter, especially when it's extra snowy, but by late February, I start to get the garden itch. By mid-March, I'm very itchy: my living room floor is strewn with garden books and Lee Valley catalogs, and my Google search history is peppered with garden blogs.

It has been an especially long winter where I live in Hamilton, Ontario. It's April, and winter still isn't quite ready to leave. When it finally does, I will dig into the plans (pun very much intended) I've been making for the last two itchy months.

This year, my big plan is to add some decoration and colour to the un-plantable spaces around my house with potted perennials. Wha?! Potted perennials, you say? Yep. It can be done.

I'm not a fan of annuals, and I'm not good at growing them. But I adore perennials, and I'm okay at growing them, so I did a little research to see how they might fare in containers. It turns out they do just fine. Several varieties will even survive through the winter, and that's what I'm after. This great article about how to grow potted perennials has a helpful list of such varieties and explains some techniques for over-wintering your potted perennials.

Growing perennials in containers has several virtues:

You can add plant life to spaces where you can't grow anything (like that awkward space beside your house or on your patio).
You can add colour to areas of the garden that are finished flowering.
When you divide perennials in your garden, you have a use for the divisions your friends don't want.
You don't have to spend money each spring on new annuals for all your pots.

Fortunately, a lot of the plants I already have in my garden do well in containers: Bellflower (Campanula), Coneflower (Echinacea), Coral Bells (Heuchera), Creeping Phlox, Daylily (Hemerocallis), Hardy Geranium (Cranebill), Hosta and Jacob's Ladder (Polemonium). (Check out the above article for more varieties.) All I need to do is divide what I already have: my only cost will be some potting soil. Still, I might just have to poke around some garden centres to see if some other perennials need a new home . . .