Pacific Northwest Gardening: Planning Containers for this summer, 1 by susybell

susybell wrote:
Hi rockems,
How exciting! There's a chocolate lysimachia that might be interesting to work with also, maybe you could have two sets of combinations and alternate them, one with the creeping charlie, and one with the lysimachia.

There are some oriental lilies that will bloom as late as august (They're the fragrant ones, too) and if you plant them this spring, they will bloom the same year. They also bloom later if they're planted in the spring. There's a lily grower in Vancouver, The Lily Garden, and she could tell you which would be the best bets. There are a lot of yellow or yellow/white lilies-and they don't take a lot of space, (except vertically) so they wouldn't even need to be the focal point, but the fragrance wafting across your garden-how wonderful that could be! You'll want to think about style or feel you want, though, they can be a bit dominant.

You might want to look at grasses, too. They're very contemporary, look fab in pots, no fussing with them to make them look good, and there are some really pretty ones. Katye's better at the grasses than I am, I can't remember the name of the one I'm thinking of, maybe she'll pop up and pull it out of my brain for me.

As far as the pots, maybe if you just made sure they were all the same color? I don't know what your budget for this is, but Costco has some lovely Vietnamese stoneware in browns-caramels, golds, chocolate, dark cream, all a little different, with a very pretty scrolled edge. They're medium-sized, maybe 18" high-and they're $29.99 each. Not cheap, but a fantastically good price for good stoneware, and they might make a nice wedding memento that lasts for years and years for you as well. They won't have them for very long, though.

The small-leaved plant in this picture is the lysimachia (Ignore the white flower, it's a vine that actually got a bit out of control)