Arthur’s favourite pots

Arthur's Favourite Pots

From his trusted Sankey pot to galvanised containers, Arthur shows you all of his favourite containers, and teaches you how to choose the right size pot for your garden.

Arthur tends to go for bigger pots. The bigger the pot, the more compost you can get in and the bigger the plants can be. Bigger pots mean less maintenance, too.

Terracotta pots are used for pelargoniums, Mediterranean plants that don't need much watering. They have small rootballs and are happy as long as they're watered every week in the summer and every month when they're brought inside in the winter. They're happy to live their whole life in terracotta pots.

Sankey Pot

A new terracotta pot is cheaper, but you have to shop around for newer, nicer ones. If you want it to whether you can paint natural yoghurt on it to encourage algae growth quite quickly.

Galvanised Containers

Galvanised containers are Arthur's favourite types of containers. He's used scented pelargoniums and paired them with Panicum 'Frosted Explosion', which is a beautiful, fast-growing plant.

Arthur would recommend that if you had a balcony and wanted a natural fence of foliage, several galvanised pots with annual grasses inside could act as a natural barrier. Alliums are quite drought-tolerant, but they love to be neglected. It's important to pick the alliums. You could leave the Panicum all through the winter and it would be fine with the snow and frost.

Pale Pot

Arthur is constantly on eBay, Preloved, and all the other second-hand sites and antique yards searching for second-hand containers. Reclamation yards and antique shops are also great places for finding pots. You need to be constantly looking. They're all from farms largely, so they're nice galvanised materials that will last for ages. When you get the pots home, tip them upside down with a drill or a hammer and a clout nail and make drainage holes in them. They'll last a lifetime as long as they've got drainage at the bottom and polystyrene and gravel to protect the galvanised base. Drainage is really important to prolong the life span of pots.

Picking Plants for Pots

All the pots will be planted with spring bulb lasagnes. The pots aren't about having a permanent planting. It's all about knowing how much time you're going to have to look after your plants. It's about thinking about how much time and patience you're able to give your growing season.

If you've got little time and don't want to water every day during the summer, pelargoniums are the way to go.

Pot Sizes

So a large pot is likely to have far more impact when it comes to container sizes, so it's helpful to keep that in mind when choosing containers. Arthur likes to have lines of dolly tubs or the big cretan pots bouncing off each other and in the middle. Consider the arrangement of the pots as a triangle.

Plant Directory

• French Marigolds
• Pelargoniums
• Panicum 'Frosted Explosion'