Thrill, fill and spill with container gardening

I love the way good containers look but I don’t even know where to start.

Making containers shine is pretty easy. Follow the conventional formula. You need a thriller, a spiller and a filler. Or multiples of that. For ideas. I like to go to a few places: Proven Winners, a plant-producing company (https://www.provenwinners.com/container-gardening/container-recipes/search), and Fine Gardening magazine (https://www.finegardening.com/article/10-plants-for-year-round-containers) have great ideas. Once you’ve looked at containers for a while, your ideas will begin to flow.

Notice what appeals to you about a pot. Is it the difference in the colors of the foliage and the color of the pot? The textures? Be sure to take note that not all of the plant materials will grow in this zone. But we can substitute plants that will grow well here.

Thrillers tend to be upright plants, like cordyline or ornamental grasses, or canna lilies, salvias, etc. They take center stage in the pot and whether they flower or not, demand attention.

Fillers add color and depth to the planting. I’ve seen crotons, caladiums, dragon wing begonias, calibrachoa, mondo grass, angelonias, ferns, and dusty miller used fill in the pot. In a large pot, you can have two types of fillers.

Lastly the spillers. For this you need a plant that drapes down over the pot. Try sweet allysum, ivy, herbs or some vining plants to add grace to the design.

Now, to keep these plants happy you need a large pot, probably 10-20 gallon in size, and a fairly rich but well-draining soil mix in it to keep them well nourished. Some plants are bullies so keep an eye out to see if any one plant is taking over the whole pot. Be sure to apply a balanced fertilizer and water regularly as they will be needing water above all with these hot temperatures. Consider the sun conditions before you choose your plants. There are shade- and sun-loving caladiums and begonias but you must match their needs or they will not survive. A container well chosen is plant matchmaking. There will be failures. Keep trying until you get it right. Then it will make you smile every day!

I put pittosporum across the front of my house because I like it but also because it is supposed to be low maintenance. Now it has this mottled look. What is going on with it?

Pittosporum is low maintenance, but it doesn’t like a lot of splashed water. Although you haven’t been watering it, mother nature has been a little generous. Not recently, of course, but last summer and most of the winter we had lots of rain. That rain has triggered angular leaf spot on your pittosporum. Like most shrubs, pittosporum is pretty drought tolerant once it is established.

Fungal diseases are kind of funny. You can protect the new growth, but you can’t erase the problem from the older leaves. We don’t really kill fungus diseases; we just suppress them.

Fungus thrives on three things — darkness, wetness and the fungal spores. We can’t control two out of three. You will want to avoid getting the leaves wet. Check to make sure you don’t have a misadjusted sprinkler head that has rotated to water that area.

You can treat the plants with a fungicide containing mycobutanil or azoxystrobin. One of the products that will work is Immunox. Please follow label directions. Do not accidentally use chlorothalolonil (Daconil) as it can damage pittosporum.

Maintain your fertilizer applications and hopefully you will soon have new growth that will cover the older, damaged leaves.

I found a new plant in the nursery called Mexican feather grass. It’s so beautiful! What can you tell me about it?

It’s a beauty all right! I had one about 10 years ago and it succumbed to the August rains. It’s been planted a lot more now, so you can read a lot more about it online now. Some of it’s good and some of it’s bad.

It’s an absolute beauty of an ornamental grass — soft and compact and with a lot of flow. In California and dry areas, it’s become quite invasive. But we aren’t dry like that, so it may not be invasive here. I said that once about a plant from California and lived to regret it. Sometimes plants are quite tolerant and can be invasive in a broad set of conditions.

I can say from experience that it is absolutely intolerant of poor drainage. Container growth with sharp drainage would be recommended if you want it to be perennial. And a watchful eye is wise if you want to be a good steward of our environment.

Becky Wern is a Master Gardener with the Duval County Extension Service and the University of Florida/IFAS. For gardening questions, call the Duval County Extension Office at (904) 255-7450 from 9 a.m. to noon and 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. and ask for a Master Gardener.