How to grow... Seasonal baskets

Get ready for months of joyous jewel tones and prep some bright and bountiful baskets. Anne Swithinbank explains how to cultivate long-lasting balls of cascading colour

- Anne Swithinbank

FOR bringing colour up to buildings and for decorating the vertical spaces of gardens small and large, you can’t beat seasonally planted baskets, pots and windowboxes.

The range of cascading tender perennials is stunning; I find the unusual shades and colour combinations in the flowers of petunia, calibrachoa and bidens especially good. The aim with most basket planting is to go big and to create an impressive ball of blooms and foliage, with curtains of glechoma and unusual touches guaranteed to make folk stop and look. But if flamboyance is not your style, then refined choices of one plant type per container work well, too – for instance, try the silvery trailing foliage and claw-like scarlet blooms of parrot’s beak or coral gem (Lotus berthelotii) or the inflated, slipper-like flowers of Calceolaria ‘Sunshine Yellow’.

Circles of life