You can chart the geography of London by its window boxes. In a few weeks, it’ll be 15 years since I moved here, the city where this country girl fell in love with gardening.
I started by looking at what other people grew. I looked beyond the glare of bright West End lights and saw smart stucco buildings with window boxes crammed full of primped ivy and glossy-leaved cyclamen, and neat miniature box balls, all lined up like soldiers.
But things are nearly always a bit more interesting behind the scenes, which is how I discovered central London’s mews – the runs of smaller houses behind its grand garden squares. They are more interesting places to explore for container planting inspiration. These quiet, cobbled streets have no front gardens, but pop with rag-tag collections of plant containers, grand and improvised.
I’m something of a lapsed container gardener. For the first seven years that I grew things, I did so entirely on balconies; but having been blessed with a garden since 2020 I’ve increasingly shifted landwards. I recently sorted and emptied the containers I brought from my old garden into the blank expanse of the new garden, and they now sit empty and questioning. I’m not sure what to do with them.
Time, then, for a mews potter. Good container gardens have the same qualities as other well-designed gardens: cohesion, a range of height and interest, and something to offer all year around. The biggest mistake people often make is choosing pots that are too small and trying one of everything currently in bloom in the garden centre in them. The result can look like a horticultural jumble sale, not to mention difficult to nurture: the bigger the pot, the greater the amount of compost and water, the more self-sufficient the plant.
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Don’t be afraid of height, in either plant or pot. A small tree – especially a multi-stem variety – can do far more heavy lifting aesthetically than a few little pansies. Now is a good time to buy and plant them. You can use this as the base of your container garden. Something like an Amelanchier lamarckii, which produces white flowers and copper leaves in spring, which turn red in autumn.
Evergreens (I’m a fan of Fatsia japonica, which throws out big star-shaped leaves in all kinds of shady spots, and starbursts of structural white flowers at this time of year) will do the work when others are bare. Muehlenbeckia complexa is a politely thuggish vine that will trundle elegantly over the edges of your pots, and, along with small ivies, helps stitch everything together. All of them will last far longer than the paintbox cyclamen that are whipped in and out of autumn containers.
