Tender is a very smart dress shop where they take their fashion seriously. As I take the landscape seriously, we relate just fine to one another. Commercial clients understand that the presentation of their business outdoors says a lot about what goes on inside. They want the outside of their store to look as fresh and newly conceived as what they carry inside. I am thinking about Tender today, as Fine Gardening magazine wants to publish a picture of one of my containers in their special spring container issue. As part of their profile on me, they asked me why I value container plantings.
A container planting is a one-season committment. Unlike the landscape, the plants have to be replaced every year. The responsibility for a landscape can go on for many years. I sometimes don’t make changes that I should, out of sheer inertia. But my containers force change on me. I have no choice but to observe and learn how to do better, and redo them-or be stuck twiddling my thumbs from sheer boredom. A container planting is a miniature version of any landscape. I would much prefer growing up as a gardener over four square feet and some annuals, than 100 square feet and a truckload of shade perennials.
My work enables me to design many landscapes, but there is only one which belongs to me. I’ve made some decisions about it that I will no doubt keep as long as I garden there. Though I value history and continuity in my landscape, my annual containers are perennially fresh in that saucy adolescent sort of way. By the time they get tiresome, they are over; a new season is not far behind, chasing me about what is next.
I also like the idea that any person interested in gardening is not shut out by their hard surfaces. Containers are great for people who lack land. I entertain guests for dinner on a wood deck-should I do without a garden there? I have planted the pots pictured above a good many years, sometimes four times a year. This kind of exposure to handling the same pots, the same surface, and the same location in a fresh way is a challenge I am heir to-so I should best welcome it.
People experience nature on a lot of levels. One year, every spring pink flowering tree I saw irritated me. A pink tree-ridiculous. A tree, looking like a party dress for an eight year old-what serious gardener would want one? This year, the pink crabs and magnolias enchanted me. I so appreciate that one aspect of gardening invites me to indulge my mood with a gesture that is very much about the moment. The gestures I make new every season-they are worth it.
Pumpkin hats on the conical boxwood-this made me smile. The willow sticks dyed orange-I bought an entire container load of these some years ago from Spain- in lots of jewel like colors. Several hundred thousand sticks-no kidding. Getting a phytosanitary certificate sufficient to get them through customs was a headache that made me want to black out. Though looking at this picture makes me want them again in the worst way, I know something new is just ahead of me.
The winter is our quiet season. Our colors are subdued, but not our gardening spirit. But for these planters, with their Alberta spruce topiaries and their greens, this view would be more bleakly about concrete than need be.
This year one gallon size PJM rhododendron and dwarf globe arborvitae filled the rectangular pots. I bought dead trees from my nursery supplier, and varnished the bark after dusting them with copper spray paint. Platinum ball ornaments and squares of tarred jute ornament the trees. Each tree had a bird’s nest of fine platinum colored wire at the base. A winter landscape.
A new supplier sent me the most divinely cinnamon colored curly willow this fall. Flame willow, they call this. The short blonde curly cloud you see at their base-peach paper covered wire. How this willow and these paper picks came to be in my hand-a new look for these pots forced me to consider new materials in unlikely partnership. The blue green noble fir-a strikingly lush base to all of these orangy top knots. Gardens in containers-it can be more than you bargained for, should you let it.
Judging from the numbers of people I try to help grow healthy yews who cannot spot that yellow/green yews indicate a water or drainage problem, I think green is so pervasive in a landscape, people stop seeing it. If you are not tuned in to green, you are missing a good portion of the pleasure and satisfaction of a landscape. Designing with green in mind-don’t miss this. 
There are times when color is the most important element of a landscape design. This building, circa 1880, had become home to a well known and cutting edge advertising firm-Harris Marketing. Any commercial client in the design business is keen that the landscape reflect as much attention to design as possible. What you see outside is a visual reflection of what goes on inside. In this case, the architecture and materials of the building itself made the color issue a very important design issue.
Though the building was large, and several stories high, there was very little land on which to landscape. The building facade was comprised of brick of an astonishingly bright orange color, and stone. In addition, the right of way space was paved in orange brick. Any successful landscape design would need to address that color in a thoughtful way, and then create visual interest in a very tight space. My first decision was to choose one plant element that would represent that brick color-a Crimson Sentry maple. Since the right of way locusts were planted at regular intervals, and framed in brick, I planted a row of these columnar red/orange/brown leaved maples in the spaces between the locusts-this visually added the right of way trees, and the land in which they were planted, to my landscape design. 
I rarely plant dark foliaged trees, as the color can be hard to work with, and muddy at any distance. This siting places these maples close to the viewers eye, backed up by that bright orange brick; the color of those leaves worked well. Large bottomless planter boxes made from corten steel served a dual purpose. The eventual orange brown of the steel would make my color references stronger. They also permitted me to make a grade change in a small space. They made a 3-D representation of the brick borders around the locust trees. This unexpected element catches the eye. 
I planned to plant hydrangeas in the boxes, and Sum and Substance hostas in the ground. The greenish white flowers of the hydrangeas, and the lime green foliage of the hostas would contrast with those orange brown leaves in a sparkly way. We lined the planter boxes with sheet insulation; once the ground would freeze in the boxes, I wanted it to stay frozen. Too much freezing and thawing might hinder my chances for success with hydrangeas, whose roots would be above grade.
Making this long run in several boxes dramatically reduced the fabrication cost, and made transport much easier. The boxes and hydrangeas would also screen the basement level windows, and window air conditioners from view. Old buildings like this one a very difficult to adapt to modern air conditioning. This fact did not need to be part of the public presentation of the building.
A stripe of PJM rhododendron unexpectedly repeats the maple leaf color. I think it is a good idea to be clear in executing what you are trying to achieve. There would be no opportunity to explain to passersby what I meant. If I need to explain the intent of a design, I need to rethink the design. 
It would take some time for that corten steel to orange up. Corten steel only rusts to a certain point, and then becomes stable. Once the hydrangeas matured, they completely screened the lower floor windows. Though I would not ordinarily block light to the interior of a building, there were security issues that my client decided were more important.
The finished landscape has a beat. A lively rhythm, and attention to the color relationships established by the building and environment attracts attention-any business hopes for this. I would have been happier for more evergreens given our climate, but my client reasoned that few people would be walking by in the winter. The orangy brown boxes would make a statement to people driving by. Any strong geometric statement would attract the kind of attention they were looking for. 