When you arrange your patio, throw away preconceived notions. Work with a free hand and a free mind, confident that with patioscaping, anything goes and everything grows.
For once, in gardening, you create the environment and are not the unwilling accomplice to it. If you want the patio in partial shade, roof it over with a trelliswork frame of two by fours.
A bonus of interesting shadow patterns will come with the partial shade. Or, if you have a wind problem but still want some breeze, build a redwood baffle or a staggered brick wall. You can even put the baffle on rollers so it can be moved like a hospital screen.
Your patio itself can be anywhere, from the roof of the apartment house to the back or front yard.
One of the most impressive I’ve seen was behind a Boston apartment house, on the ground that had previously been a jungle of trash and garbage cans. Of course, if the patio is in the shade of established trees or buildings, you have lost part of your patio freedom, for this shade is fixed.
Make Your Patio As Moveable As Possible
You’ll probably be best pleased if you make your patio as mobile—literally on rollers—as possible. Then you can change the setting and the mood to fit the occasion.
Give it a look of snug intimacy for an afternoon or evening of quiet chit-chat or a spacious feeling for an outdoor dinner party. Trees, shrubs, vines, baffles, screens, barbecue, and furniture can all be rolled around on wheels.
But with the ordinary furnishings, you’ll use the same taste and judgment you would indoors, giving the furniture groupings a look of invitation, with chairs placed to urge occupancy and encourage sociability; tables related to their uses and the total impression casual, but complete.
Avoid the monotonous regularity of paired arrangement or too much balance.
The secret of the successful patio arrangement, as of the landscape, is the selection and placement of plant materials. This, together with some hints about culture, is what we want mainly to discuss.
Wide Plant Selection
Most patio gardeners begin with the opinion that there are only a few specialized plants suitable for the patio. Leading the list of these usually are the old favorites geraniums, coleus, and Begonia semperflorens and some others borrowed from indoor plant furnishings.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these. Geraniums offer high color, gayety, and cheer. A collection of potted coleus or caladiums or a planter full of them can have all the patterns and colors of a Persian carpet. Begonias lend a lush quality to shade—and offer a sprinkling of color at the same time.
These are popular because they flower all summer and can be relied upon to brighten the patio. The flowering season is not so important when your plants are in pots or mounted on rollers.
With mobile plants, you can use any material you please—roll it in when it’s in flower and roll it out when it’s no longer attractive. This way, you can have many patio moods at your beck and call, many color schemes in easy reach.
Plants That Will Not Grow In Pots If Grown Outside
With consideration for their needs, there are few plants you can’t grow in pots—when they’re grown outside. You can seed all your favorite annuals for shifting from flats into pots—then use them with a lavish hand when they’re in flamboyant color.
That way, a mistake in the color scheme is easily rectified. You can have your cake and have it too.
Have the yellow calendulas for one week with the dwarf, bushy blue bachelor’s-buttons in front, and then the next week, try them with a long edging of annual pink phlox.
If the red and gold hybrid marigolds aren’t as pleasing as you hoped teamed with blue Salvia patens, move the salvia.
Tips for Potted Annuals
Bear one thing in mind when you’re potting up seedling annuals. Pot plants need soil with slightly more water retention than those planted out in the garden, and they need richer soil than in the garden.
After all, they are limited to a small cylinder of soil and can’t send roots out searching for nutrients. And water departs through pot sides as well as the soil surface.
So add more leaf mold and well-rotted manure at the potting time and carry on a regular program of feeding either through foliar spray or soluble chemicals in the water.
Banking Potted Annuals According To Height
Another advantage of potted annuals is that you can bank them according to height—without having the zinnias behind turn out to be shorter than the American marigolds in front, as so often occurs in the garden.
Iris, hemerocallis, cannas, lilies, and many other tuberous or bulb plants can be grown in planters or boxes, which may be lifted onto rollers and moved from garden to patio when in flower and moved back again after blossoming is past.
You can plant gladiolus corms every 15 days from spring to July 1 for continuous flowering from June to frost. Use a different variety every planting to keep the display fresh and exciting.
Shallow rooted perennials can be grown in containers, too. Why use valuable space for chrysanthemum or aster plants when they are interesting only in fall? Even roses can be grown this way, giving that queen of flowers a new versatility.
You’ll find masses of ferns grown in planters a couple of feet long, invaluable for settings. If you have amaryllis you’re proud of in flower, what more dramatic setting could it have than a bank of ferns? Or a tuberous begonia with the same backdrop?
Pot the ferns in loam rich in leaf mold. Use either fern native to your locality or cultivated species that can spend the winter in the living room window.
Hanging Plants Will Lend Elegant Accents
Trailing plants set on top of the baffle, hung from a tree, or suspended from a stand such as is used for a birdcage will lend elegant accents. Hanging basket tuberous begonias make handsome specimens used this way.
Old fashioned wandering jews or the variegated types, including zebrina (try that wonderful variety in white, pink and green, Z. pendula tricolor), are excellent for a shaded spot.
Fuchsias show off their pendulous blossoms to the best advantage grown this way. The spray-type lantanas, those developed from the lavender Lantana montevidensis, are magnificent planted in urns. Try growing shrubs and vines in containers, too.
Heavenly blue and other morning-glories, Spanish flag (Quamoclit lobata) with its masses of red and yellow blossoms, hyacinth and scarlet runner beans, black-eyed Susan vine (Thunbergia alata), and other annual vines do well in pots.
Grow then on wires against the wall, but don’t use the shortest distance between two points philosophy and run the wires in a straight line from the ground to building eaves. Use wire that’s stiff enough so it can have a draped effect without being unsteady.
If you grow moonflowers (Calonyction aculeatum), start them early indoors and give them plenty of wall space. They add a touch of fragrant magic to an evening.
Aromatic Blossoms Of Citrus Fruits In Tubs
Oleanders or flowering maples in tubs are effective. Try the little flowering maple, Abutilon megapotamicum, espaliered against a wall. Its small, pendent yellow and deep red blossoms offer charm. Citrus fruits in tubs bring fragrant flowers and colorful fruit. All of these, of course, must be wintered inside.
If you prefer things that can be left out over winter, use Japanese cherry or flowering crab and other smaller flowering trees and shrubs. They can be moved on stage for the flowering season, then taken off and replaced when they’re out of bloom.
Flowering crab with masses of potted spring bulbs at its feet creates a delightful spring picture.
Best for starting a container flowering crab is two-year-old grafted plants. Root prune to fit a ten- to 12-inch pot. Pack in hard any good garden soil.
Cut back one-half the length of shoots without buds in the spring of the second year. Shift every two or three years into a larger pot, adding fresh soil—sink the pot in the garden after flowering.
During winter, set the container in a trench a little deeper than the pot, then cover over with leaves or peat moss.
Portable Shrubs
The low cotoneasters (Cotoneaster horizontalis is a good choice) or pyracantha will supply bright berries later in the season. Shrub honeysuckle has both flowers and red berries to offer. Keep old wood heavily pruned, so you have a vigorous, low plant.
And there can even be a patio spot for water plants —you can grow water-lilies in a tub or try a basin with the double arrowhead (Sagittaria sagittifolia flore-pleno) and some cat-tails.
For something more elaborate, install a fountain. It will supply a focal point around which the entire patio may be planned. Another effective center of interest, in the patio as in the garden, is a small statue with banks of ferns and foliage plants arranged behind it.
Patio On First Snowfall
Don’t just abandon your patio with the first snowfall and leave it until spring. It can be visually interesting even in winter. Put arrangements of evergreen boughs in some of the planters.
You can move in a potted Colorado blue spruce to the patio in the fall. Bittersweet, branches of scarlet oak, red and yellow twig dogwoods (Cornus stolonifera) may all be used to form pleasing arrangements.
The winter patio scene will be more interesting, too, if when you plan the patio, you plant groupings of evergreens at corners or nearby.
Rhododendrons are not so good for this purpose since their leaves hang instead disconsolately during winter. Spruce, fir, yew, holly, pieris, and mountain laurel are excellent. With more grace than any of the others, Hemlock is one of the very best evergreens for use near the patio. It does well potted also.
Mugo pine flourishes in pots and can be moved into place for winter on the patio—set against a baffle, it will have a Japanese effect, particularly if pruned for an irregular branch pattern.
Because of their inclination to turn brown in the winter, juniper and cedar are less appealing. Juniperus squamata meyeri, on the other hand, has a tall height with bluish foliage. It’s an excellent container subject.