terrazzo planters

Gar­den pots and planters can be made out of almost any­thing that can stand up to sun and mois­ture. Clay, both glazed and unglazed, has been the main mate­r­ial of choice for nat­ural mate­ri­als, and it can assume all kinds of shapes, sizes and col­ors. Plas­tic wins out in the area of man-made mate­ri­als, com­bin­ing lighter weight, extremely mold-ability and options for all sorts of col­ors, usu­ally com­bined with lower cost.

The three big pots I picked for the new plants on the roof deck are made out of a less unusual mate­r­ial: ter­razzo, a con­crete that’s been ground down so that you can see the pol­ished aggre­gate mixed in with the cement matrix. Being made from con­crete, they’re heavy–more so than low-glazed ceramic. But I really like their sur­faces and the mod­ern pro­files of this line from Viet­nam. Here’s a closeup of their sur­face, con­trasted here against the leaves of Euphor­bia cotini­fo­lia:

Terrazzo planter detail

Ter­razzo planter detail

Con­crete planters are used com­monly in com­mer­cial sit­u­a­tions because of their extreme stur­di­ness, but this ter­razzo fin­ish­ing tech­nique looks to be fairly uncom­mon. (A web search found lots of out­lets in Aus­tralia, but not the U.S.) But for­tu­nately they’re avail­able here in San Diego at Wal­ter Ander­son Nurs­ery. They’re not super-cheap–maybe dou­ble the cost of similarly-size ceramic pots at home stores, but they’re not ridicu­lous, either.

August 13 2008 04:49 am | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: • •

3 Responses to “terrazzo planters”

  1. Amy on 13 Aug 2008 at 2:57 pm #

    Those planters are a great find, I’m glad you put a link to them! I may check out one or two for myself, since they look so much dif­fer­ent than the aver­age planter from the major chain stores, and come in a few unique shapes. Your rooftop gar­den looks great too!

  2. Greg on 14 Aug 2008 at 10:06 pm #

    I do really like the look of these…but is the some­what rea­son­able cost bal­anced out by the chi­ro­prac­tic bill fol­low­ing actu­ally car­ry­ing them up to the roof?

    Fair warn­ing: there’s some annoy­ing cheer­ful yel­low flow­ers over at the Mid­night Gar­den tonight.

  3. lostlandscape on 15 Aug 2008 at 9:13 am #

    There’s the old cliche about artists and suffering…The same thing could be said with some truth about gardeners!

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