agonizing over the right pot

I’m a lit­tle embar­rassed to admit that peo­ple often hate to go shop­ping with me. Plants, clothes, paint col­ors, cheese…it can some­times take me a long time to make up my mind. I admit that these aren’t life-or-death deci­sions I’m mak­ing. But as far as I’m con­cerned that’s no excuse not to pay atten­tion to the process. Some things in life are still very impor­tant.

Dur­ing last week’s plant shop­ping adven­ture I picked up three lit­tle aloes I wanted to pot up for the back patio. I was sur­prised by how quickly I was able to pick between all the cool offer­ings. Some col­lec­tors like one of every­thing that catches their eye. By con­trast I guess I like to col­lect one thing in depth. Accord­ingly I picked an inter­est­ing genus of plant (Aloe) and then decided on three con­trast­ing but com­ple­men­tary exam­ples. I was a lit­tle both­ered that two of the three were unknowns, but I don’t begin to con­sider myself an aloe col­lec­tor. They looked cool and the price was rea­son­able. Deci­sion made.

Then came time to select pots for the plants and for the loca­tion where they’d live. The local Home Depot had some func­tional designs but noth­ing that excited me. Then I was off to my favorite local nurs­ery. Even when I set some basic rules for myself (“noth­ing match­ing,” “a sim­ple design not detract­ing from the plant,” “earth tones or glazed blue for color”) I ended up with lots of work­able options. Since the nurs­ery has a good return pol­icy I picked six to take home to see how they looked on the patio and with the plants.

None of the pots were really pricey, but in all cases they were priced higher than the plants. A lot of the prof­its in the nurs­ery and land­scap­ing biz aren’t the plants them­selves, but all the stuff that goes with them.

So in the end I kept four of the pots and rejected the cen­ter and right of the largest pots in the first photo. The extra pot now houses a lit­tle divi­sion of Aloe mac­u­lata (a.k.a. A. saponaria) that I dug up from the front yard. It’s typ­i­cally an aggres­sive colonizer–the Matil­ija poppy of aloes–spreading under­ground via long stolons. I’m not sure how it’ll do in a pot, so this is an experiment.

Here’s part of the fin­ished edge of the patio. Clock­wise from the top: Aloe andon­gen­sis, A. saponaria, unknown red aloe.

And here’s the last of the aloes, yet another unknown, nearby in its new pot.

In my teen years I did some infor­mal study of Japan­ese bon­sai and ike­bana, the art of arrang­ing branches, leaves and flow­ers. Pro­por­tion pro­por­tion pro­por­tion were big themes in both, and one of the stan­dard for­mu­las was that the con­tainer should be approx­i­mately one and a half times the height of the plant mate­r­ial. In all my pots the plants seem too small, but as we all know plants do that amaz­ing thing: grow. Since some of these are unknown species I have no idea how much they’ll grow. But I hope they’ll come to look more at home in their new digs.

Okay, now it’s time to worry about the next big thing…

July 19 2010 06:30 am | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • •

5 Responses to “agonizing over the right pot”

  1. Town Mouse on 19 Jul 2010 at 5:22 pm #

    Well, why buy any­thing if you don’t spend a lit­tle time think­ing about it? For me, look­ing around, com­par­ing dif­fer­ent choices is half of the fun.

    I really like all the pots, and the fact that they don’t match makes it look as if they’ve been in the gar­den for along time.

  2. Loree / danger garden on 19 Jul 2010 at 8:19 pm #

    Are we related? Cause you are pretty much describ­ing me. I love your choices…and as for the A. saponaria I expect you will find that it loves life in a con­tainer and con­tin­ues to pro­duce babies. I’ve had one (in a pot of course) for 4 or 5 years now and it’s a great great grand­mother. In fact it’s pro­duced so many pups that I finally planted a few in the ground this year, on the off chance that they’ll sur­vive. And if not, oh well.

  3. Wendy on 21 Jul 2010 at 6:18 pm #

    ha ha ha! I have the same prob­lem — analy­sis paral­y­sis. Your choices are great though — the aloe looks very happy.

  4. Candy "Sweetstuff" Suter on 24 Jul 2010 at 10:24 pm #

    Won­der­ful job of pot choices and plants! They will grow nicely and look terrific!

  5. Christine on 03 Aug 2010 at 7:16 am #

    And good use of peb­ble mulch, too!

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