Books: Five-Plant Containers

Your garden may look great, but every garden needs containers, urns, window boxes, whatever.  And this new book, Container Theme Gardens: 42 Combinations, Each Using 5 Perfectly Matched Plants (Storey Publishing, 2015), by author Nancy Ondra, will make things easy for you.

Each entry - for example, "Back to Black," -- includes the size of the container, cultural requirements, a photo of it, planted -- a description and photo of each of the five plants, and substitutions that you may like to make.

There are "themes" for every occasion: All Summer Color, Asian-Inspired Beauty, Elegant Whites, A Mini Meadow, Hummingbird Haven, Salad on Deck, and many more.

My usual solution was always to take the container to the nursery and fill it with pots of plants until I got more or less what I desired.  Nancy Ondra's book is a much better idea.  It's the perfect book, of course, for any designer or dedicated gardener with a balcony, a terrace, a front stoop or a deck.