Planter pointers: 7 tips to amp up your container garden

They work on stoops, on streets, in sprawling yards; in gardens and porches and patios.

But it’s not just versatility that makes a container garden so appealing. It’s also the sense of possibility — the chance to mix and match infinite plant (and container) combos to create something beautiful in any season.

“You can have fun,” said Melissa Lowrie, plant expert and district merchandising manager for the nursery-and-garden destination Terrain, which has retail shops in Devon, Doylestown, and Glen Mills. “Bring in tropicals, if you want. Succulents. We love a Bird of Paradise moment for the summer.”

Of course, what you ultimately choose to put in your pots depends on what you like, as well how much light and time you’re working with. But when it comes to styling your container garden — thinking about what to plant, and why, and how to arrange it all — Lowrie and her team have loads of tactics for elevating a humble passel of planters into a gorgeous container garden, in whatever space you happen to have.

Here, seven of her top tips and tricks:

We’re not just talking about size (rule of thumb: planters should be two inches larger than a plant’s diameter, even more if you have time and patience to let the container fill in, Lowrie said), but also color and texture. For one thing, she said, “If a container is too glossy, it can take your eye away from the planting.”

To play up the plants, Lowrie likes natural materials and finishes that “speak to the earth and the nature around it.”

Want to do better than that lone pansy in a pot but aren’t sure what to layer in? Ask your local nursery for recs, Lowrie suggests, or look for premixed planters (“patio pots” in Terrain-speak).

Choose a mix that suits your space — full sun, shade, and so forth — and then watch over a season “to get a feel for the way the blooms come in and out,” she said. “It’s a nice starter.”

When you’re picking plants, Lowrie said to consider whether they’re going to be enjoyed from a distance (as in, say, a yard) or in an everyday, up-close-and-personal way.

For the former, one way to garden for impact is to iterate on a color theme, planting various shades of a single base color to loosely tie it all together.

If it’s the latter, Lowrie said, ”I like planting small bits that you wouldn’t catch from a distance” — a sweet little annual; a delicate flowering vine — “to add a moment of joy or surprise.”

Like many designers, Lowrie and her team like odd numbers for groupings, recommending a variety of pot sizes to keep things interesting. In a group of three, this might mean one high planter, a low, wide one, and one small one.

Even pairs ought not be identical, she said: “Two pots might ‘speak’ to each other, but they’re not going to be exactly the same.”

“If you’ve been raised thinking that gardens are just flowers, you’re going to end up with a whole lot of things that are largely the same size,” Lowrie said.

Her go-tos? Shrubs, grasses (try Mexican feather grass — ”so wispy and beautiful; you can mix it with anything!”), scented geraniums, herbs, and veggies.

“I like to find the weirdest thing growing in the back of the greenhouse,” Lowrie said. “Something overgrown, with character and movement. I love a tortured plant. Somebody reaching for the light is going to have a more interesting shape.”

One quick way to zhuzh up your outdoor space is to move your indoor plants out.

“This is a big thing we push,” Lowrie said. “They love a vacation outside with all this humidity.”

Got citrus? Tropicals? Succulents? A bored-looking cactus? Let ‘em out!

“I love spoon tomatoes in a porch planter,” Lowrie said. “So fun. You can snack off them all day and never have to go into a garden to harvest.”