Six Pots and a Bad Summer
Resilient planting and good-looking planting get talked about as a trade-off. Mostly they aren’t. But you still have to find out what copes and in a small garden, that means running the test on almost nothing.
The thalictrum was a photograph decision. I’d seen a drift of it in Great Dixter - the offending photo above, all purple cloud above the lime green, and I bought one for a south-facing lower-ground garden that gets sun from noon until it goes round at four. It came up. It flowered, briefly. Then it fell over, and spent the rest of August looking like it would rather be somewhere else.
Ten feet away, in the gap between the paving and the drain, a calendula that had sown itself was still going in November without me lifting a finger.
The oldest rule
Right plant, right place is the first thing anyone tells you and the first thing everyone stops listening to. It sounds like a limitation. A narrowing. What you want is the plant from the picture.
But the picture is the problem. A trend palette is a photograph taken in a garden where the conditions happened to suit — deep soil, a sheltered wall, someone with an irrigation line and a free Tuesday. Recreate the plant list somewhere else and you get the list. Not the picture.
Here’s the thing. A plant growing in conditions it actually likes simply looks better. The colour is denser. Stems hold themselves up rather than leaning out for light. Foliage stays clean into late summer instead of going grey and tired. Flowering carries on longer, because the plant isn’t hurrying to set seed and be done.
A good deal of what reads as bad design is just a plant under stress.
So the resilient choice and the chic choice are the same choice far more often than the argument allows. Choosing for your conditions isn’t a compromise on how it looks. It’s the mechanism.
Where the argument breaks down
Some resilient decisions do look scruffy, and pretending otherwise is how you end up quietly disappointed in your own garden. Nasturtiums grown deliberately to be eaten will be eaten. By August they’re lace. Seedheads left standing for the birds are brown, and brown is a colour you have to argue for. A patch left to self-seed goes through a fortnight of looking simply unmanaged before it looks generous.
In a large garden none of this matters much, because there’s a working half. The bit behind the hedge where the scruff lives. A courtyard hasn’t got a behind. Six pots on a balcony are all foreground, at eye level, all season.
Which means the small-garden version of resilience isn’t letting it all go. It’s deciding where the scruff sits. Chewed nasturtiums go low and off to one side. Seedheads go where you’ll catch them backlit at four o’clock, rather than head-on from the kitchen window. The pot by the door stays decent, because it has to.
That isn’t a compromise either. That’s just editing.
Six pots, one bad week
The harder question is how you find out what copes when you’ve no room to be wrong.
A proper trial wants repeats, spare ground and several seasons. You have a balcony and one summer. So the test has to get smaller, and a bit more ruthless.
Change one thing. Two of the same plant in different positions will tell you far more than two different plants in the same position, even though it feels like a wasted pot. Same compost, same size container, same watering. Put one in the wind or the full afternoon sun, and see which one you’d rather look at in September.
Judge it in the worst fortnight. Everything is fine in June. The test is the dry spell in late July, or the week of wind that flattens anything soft-stemmed. Take a photo from the same spot on the first of every month — four seconds, and considerably more honest than memory, which will quietly edit out the six weeks something looked awful.
And keep one pot you’re prepared to lose. Not neglected exactly. Just not rescued. When you’re out there at nine at night with the watering can, that’s the one you walk past. It’s the only way to find the actual limit, and it costs you a few quid.
What’s earned its place
After a few summers of this, the survivors in my pots aren’t the plants I’d have chosen from a photograph.
Calendula, which I’ve stopped sowing because it does it itself. In flower from June until the frost properly arrives, covered in hoverflies, and it pulls out easily wherever it isn’t wanted.
Nasturtiums, on the understanding that they’ll be shredded. They flower better in poor soil than rich — feed them well and you get a magnificent quantity of leaf and almost nothing else.
Erigeron karvinskianus, which will live in a crack on very little and flower for months.
Thyme and oregano in the sunniest, driest pot, mostly for the bees. Both would far rather be underwatered than over.
And a low, tough salvia, standing in for something taller I keep being tempted by.
None of that is a trend list. It’s just what was still standing.
If you’re thinking about next year — and August is roughly when that starts, whether you meant it to or not — it’s worth deciding now which pot is the one you won’t rescue. It’ll tell you more than the others.