Bring out the baskets

A particularly cold April and early May meant that many people delayed starting their hanging baskets, but early June is a great time to start

- Anne Swithinbank

DURING a quick tidy-up, I hooked a decorative hanging basket onto the support bars of my greenhouse. Empty of flowers and filled only with a lining of lawn moss, it still managed to transform the space. This is what baskets do – they fill the middle ground with colour and interest at eye level.

For softening hard walls and fences in barren places, baskets are invaluable. Mixtures of colourful bedding-style plants are obvious basket candidates and whoever invented the cliché ‘thriller, filler, spiller’ was right. Placing a dominant specimen in the centre, with spreading flowering and foliage plants filling gaps and trailing types tumbling over the edge, works.

For those with little garden space, baskets can be microcosms of carpet bedding, kitchen or herb gardens, herbaceous prairie-style borders and even shrubberies. If you are prepared to water, feed, prune and shuffle plants around, be as inventive as you like. Some of the most effective displays consist of just one plant, including tender types hung from the lower branches of trees for a tropical look. Try the fern Phlebodium aureum, asparagus fern Asparagus densiflorus ’Sprengeri’ or a spider plant with its waterfall of plantlets. Orange-flowered Begonia sutherlandii and New Zealand Viola hederacea are unusual choices but remember to put them under cover for winter.

Early June is a great time

Spring 2021 presented us with the lowest average minimum temperatures for April since 1922 and the highest number of air frosts in 60 years. This meant a delay for many gardeners, but early June is a great time for container planting, as roots will quickly spread into fresh compost. While lining and filling our baskets, we might wonder where the idea came from.