Container Garden Inspiration @NWFGS

Container gardening is awesome for so many reasons. If you live in an apartment or condo, you might not have access to soil. Even if you live in a rental house, you might want to take your plants with you some day. If you have land at your disposal, it might not have optimal soil, temperatures or light for specific things you want to grow. The solution to all these problems? Plants in pots. The Northwest Flower & Garden Show is good at tapping into this growing method, and the display gardens always offer lots of great container inspiration. There is even a container garden competition on the bridge in the middle of the convention center. I got some snapshots of some of my favorite containers.

If you have ever been to our house, you know I have a little obsession with terrariums. Mine grow various mosses, mostly, but it’s very popular to grow little creeping plants or succulents in glass like little living sculptures. I love these fish bowls!

This is The Lusher Life Project. It was one of the competitors in the container garden competition. This was a great garden – like a patchwork quilt of so many types of succulents, old nautical stuff & rusty bits. It was like everything my wife loves in one small garden. The longer I stared at it, the more details I noticed. It was like a whole universe unfolding with endless succulent varieties.

Here’s another photo from one of the container garden displays. Those crazy plants are a marshy/aquatic pitcher plant – a carnivorous plant more commonly found in the southeastern bogs of our fine nation, but you can occasionally find them in adventurous garden ponds in the PNW. They are too fussy for me to bother with, but I love carnivorous plants.

This was from the “Funky Junk” section of the NWFGS. Local high school students create the Funky Junk gardens. This is a step up from the classic cowboy boot planters of my childhood. People plant things in cowboy boots in places other than Oklahoma, right?

I spotted several potted kumquats at the show. I’m considering getting one myself, even though we don’t really need any more small citrus plants in our house. You can make marmalade out of kumquats, so that seems like reason enough to me. Do kumquat blossoms smell as good as lemon blossoms? I need to research this.

I feel like I’m pushing the boundaries of container gardening by including this, but I am a sucker for a gabion-style planter, and these creepy, goth hellebores make my black, wizened heart smile. If I were a goth gardener, I would grow a lot of poisonous hellebores. I love how they hang their heads in shame. Since they are deer-resistant, I should probably grow some anyway.

This container garden is kind of ridiculous but it was popular with the crowd. It’s a garden in a bed! Get it? Garden bed! Yeah. The Barbie dolls are having a picnic! I thought it was pretty weird, but I couldn’t resist taking a photo. And what do I know anyway? Maybe you love it, and I’m happy to share it with you in that case.

2011 Northwest Flower & Garden Show

The snow in Olympia last week was hard on me, so over the weekend I made my annual pilgrimage to the largest garden show west of the Mississippi: the Northwest Flower & Garden Show.

This is a crucial part of my wintertime mental health. Here in the PNW, we don’t specialize in the “glowing orb in the sky,” but when you walk into the NWFGS and the wall of smells hits you – thousands of flowers in bloom, dirt, enthusiasm, money running like water – winter melts away. It’s good for your heart to see so many beautiful plants in one place, even if it’s not great for your budget to impulsively buy too many and bring them home. The display gardens were amazing. I saw some great people talk about growing things.

This year was a personal triumph for three main reasons:

1. I took the light rail for 1/3 of my trip. I avoided all the stress, cost and drama of parking in downtown Seattle and I read an entire book. It was so awesome, I may never drive to Seattle again. A+
2. I had a shopping list for the plant market at NWFGS so I didn’t make any crazy purchases. I knew what I was buying, I was able to pack the right number of sturdy cloth bags. And Raintree didn’t have any filberts, so I spent the extra money on a new garden tool. A+
3. I packed food for the day. The Seattle convention center has veggie burgers, but the price & nutritional value are never where I’d like them. An organic Minneola tangelo is more exciting. It makes me so happy to have good food when I’m braving Weather and Crowds. A+
Verdict: I win at NWFGS 2011.

The show’s theme this year was “Once Upon a Time…”, so many of the gardens leaned toward fairy tale / fantasy themes: Rapunzel, Alice in Wonderland, Three Little Pigs, The old woman who lived in a shoe, etc. Some of the gardens were not so literal about the theme, and that’s alright by me too.

The first fairy tale I spotted was the Rapunzel vertical garden. Rapunzel, her hair and her prince are all made from plants. This is one of the coolest vertical gardens I’ve seen in person.

Suburu called their garden, “Paul Bunyan Gets a Conscience.” I guess Mr. Bunyan is reconsidering the sustainability of his ways.

This is from the Wrinkle in Time display garden. I don’t understand it at all, but I do love a Wrinkle in Time. This garden won the Founders Cup (which is the plant show version of Best in Show).

One of my favorite themed gardens was the Alice in Wonderland garden by Zsofia Pasztor from Innovative Landscape Technologies. I mention the creator because the same company created my favorite planted vertical garden at the NW Flower & Garden Show in 2010 (photo here). The Alice garden had sculptural elements, a ginormous staghorn fern suspended overhead, pink plastic flamingos & a live white rabbit. I heard some woman call the bunny “a little dog” but I can verify it was actually a rabbit. With the scale, the colors, textures and sculptures, I really felt like I was in wonderland in this garden. And now I want a completely impractical large “drink me” vessel for my yard.

Hopefully I will find some time this week to talk about what else? The on-trend topics of vertical gardening, container gardening, city farming, edible gardening, succulents and other plant-related stuff I collected at the Northwest Flower & Garden Show.

Here’s our 2010 NWFGS coverage: general info here, vertical gardening here and cold frames here.

Northwest Flower & Garden Show

This weekend, we walked about 100 miles around the NW Flower & Garden Show in Seattle. It’s the third largest garden show in the country, and my feet are sore. I wore good shoes for walking – real sneakers not silly ballet flats or kitten heels as I am wont to do – but there’s no kind of shoe that can stand up to so much pavement pounding. The demo gardens were beautiful and inspirational. The vendors were friendly and had some incredible products. We saw extraordinary things, from very steampunk-meets-band nerd water features to worlds in miniature in the container garden display, lots of rhubarb and chickens, dinosaurs, dragons, and a huge number of dahlias and bulbs. Krista took a lot of photos (you can see them through that handy flickr widget-thing over to the right), and we’ll be rolling/trickling out blog posts about the most interesting, impressive and inspirational things we saw over the next…. well, I could say week, but it will probably take a few weeks to get through it. Actually, Krista just told me I cannot post about this garden show for three weeks, so I guess I’ll have to type quickly & do it in two weeks. There was a lot of stuff, though! I’m also happy to report that the PNW gnome population is doing quite well this year. We spotted a few.