planted pots – Bloomingplaces

Garden Design Ideas for a small space

Fen Ryan,

14 April 2024

Create a sense of isolation in a tiny garden space

The home & garden should compliment each other. So connecting design elements, from the architecture of the house and the style of its interior, with the garden is key to creating a designed look and feel to your garden. This can be done using colours, patterns, plants as well as form or lines and will ensure a successfully designed garden individual and unique to your home.

Unify with colour

These elements can be introduced through the correct selection of hard and soft landscaping, plants, furniture, pots, fences and ground surfaces. A unique bespoke feel can be enhanced by connecting the colour of different elements of the house such as downpipes, windows and doors to garden to the garden hardware such as furniture, fences and pots. The choice of materials for patios and surface covering in the gardens can also be connected to the house interior and chosen to compliment and contrast.

The overall looked can be enhanced by mixing and matching textures, using materials or tones to create textural interest. Texture is key to making a space feel characterful, rich and unique.

Introduce textural interest with planting

Introducing plants with interesting leaves helps bring lots of texture into the planting. Knowing light levels soil and consideration of looking after plants in the longer term are all important things to consider when making plant choice in order to ensure longevity of a garden that looks good. Surroundings and environment should be taken into consideration to ensure a garden will thrive in the longer term.

Living is easy

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Living is easy when you apply some simple rules……………. So many of us believe we are lovely, kind nice human beings. We mainly apply this way of living to our lives, until that is we come across another human being we don’t agree with. If each one of us applies some simple basic rules to our lives and follow the rules about what we say we believe in I can only imagine the world being a much pleasanter place to live in.

Add some love to your garden by painting some simple messages about what you believe in and pop them into your patio pots placed in your front porch. Food for thought for every friend or stranger who passes your way.

Don’t let the sun go down

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We are well into autumn, the days are getting shorter and the colours around have never been more striking. The contrasts between the vibrant colours of the changing leaves and the darker moodier sky captures the imagination.. Keep the colours trooping and add in some pots or hanging plants to enhance the vibe.

Pansies and violas are the perfect plant for this. They will bloom well into November.

Colourful potted pansy keeping the interest in the Autumn garden

thumbnail_DSC_0132 — Potted Pansies in shades of autumn

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Deadhead (remove faded blooms) if you want to have blooms a plenty during the first weeks of potting. As the plant starts to loose energy leave the flower heads to die back on the plant. Collect the seeds, after the flower heads fade, from the remaining pod and replant in a cold frame or in early spring to enjoy their colourful display all over again.

Where did you come from my lovely

With ample blossom, snowdrops and the beginnings of the narcissi blooming about it would appear that Spring is emerging. Time perhaps to start thinking about getting seeds in for cultivating your summer window boxes and baskets. As bedding can get quite expensive why not save seeds from last years pots and plant them to grow your own blooms this summer. If you have already discarded all of these remember there is always another chance at the end of the summer blooming season.

I especially love French marigolds for their bright colourful display and their easiness to grow and maintain. I usually have them in abundance

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Keep summer going for longer with these zesty coloured marigolds that stay blooming well into September and October if the weather is mild

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extract the tiny seeds from dead flower heads. Happy cultivating there is nothing more satisfying.

A Place to Ponder

One of my many passions in life is to travel the world and explore new places and with holidays being scarce when you work full time I always like to try and venture to new territories for new explorations. Apart from my home country of Ireland, that has entrenched in me an unbreakable bond, there is one place that keeps drawing me back for visits over the years. A trip during the summer just gone confirmed to me that this is the sort of place I could grow old in. It is the pristine white hilltop town of Vejer de la frontera, built by the Moors and preserved by the Spanish. With flowers a plenty blooming in every street, every courtyard and roof terrace, in bright vibrant colours, coupled with the beautiful white backdrop of the town, it is like waking up on a movie set every day. A great inspiration for urbanisation – fill it with flowers and the heart will blossom. Here people do not have gardens but they make use of every available space to create a town full of tiny blooming places, people together enhancing the majestic town. There is a lot to learn from Spain where living in apartment in an urban environment does not have to mean dank and grey. Vejer is a town united, where tiny blooming places gel together to make one of the prettiest places I have ever visited. It is not just contained to this particularly picturesque town in Spain, nearby towns in the Cadiz region like Conil bloom as well as the larger city of Seville to the north, where apartment living does not mean a life without a blooming outside space.

If you look behind and above the blooming rose to the forefront (insert smiley face here) you will see tiny balconies filled with flowers – no place is too small