COLOR THE GARDEN RED, WHITE, AND BLUE

Want to show your colors this Fourth of July?  Independence Day just would not be the same without our flag flying and red, white, and blue showing up everywhere, even in the garden.

Both of these pictures are easy to emulate.  One gardener spray-painted a wicker chair bright red.  She already owned the wonderful baskets.  In the large basket, she slipped in pots of red New Guinea impatiens, one on each side of the handle.  The plants follow the curve of the basket, high on the outside and low in the middle.

The small basket has a little upright red and purple fuchsia in the center.  White alyssum tumbles out of either side.  This little basket is raised up above the chair on a pedestal.  The large basket is set forward on a hidden cement block.  Putting the larger basket forward and the smaller basket in the rear gives the illusion of greater depth.  She displays all of them in the middle of blue-blossoming vinca groundcover.

The other vignette starts with a red chair, too.  This time an old wooden slat back kitchen chair is painted bright red.  This gardener removed the seat and slipped an American-Flag-Blue pot into the space.

You can make a chair into a garden pot.  Find an old chair; remove its seat, paint it, then loosely staple landscape fabric to the underside, where the seat used to be.  Make a sling potting area.  With the chair upright again, line the landscape fabric with sphagnum peat, the long, stringy kind, and then add potting soil on top of the peat.  Before you plant, add some water-holding crystals and slow release fertilizer to the potting mix.

The slat-back chair in the picture is planted with variegated ivy, Hedera helix 'Golden Ingot,' which the American Ivy Society chose as "Ivy of the Year" in 2003.  The gardener added daylilies for foliage height and golden creeping Jenny, Lysimachia nummularia, to spill over the sides.

The pot on the ground next to the chair holds red begonias and white impatiens.  Behind it, another pot of large-leaved green ivy, Algerian ivy, cascades to the ground.  The watering can is a perfect garden-oriented flag stand.  White impatiens are repeated in this can, along with a spike of dracaena and a Sambac jasmine vine, which blooms with tiny white flowers that perfume the garden air.

Show our colors this holiday week.  Look around.  Bet there is a good spot to plant Old Glory in your garden.  Go Red, White, and Blue.

---Posted by Anne K Moore, July 1, 2007---