The patio is currently the temporary home of all the plants we had managed to bring along with us from our previous garden. Also present are plants discovered in and rescued from the compost heap and plants that have been kindly donated. There are umpteen pots all displayed together and it’s turned the patio green and it looks beautiful.
From the kitchen end.
From the far end
From the front (or back?).
From above with the focus completely out of whack.
The sheer number of pots makes it feel like a kind of a garden caravan or a mobile flower show. There are spaces to really get in among the plants and to reach the ones at the back. There are also log stools made from an old pear tree to sit down on and take it all in. The pots are visible from all windows at the back of the house and the whole thing runs almost the full length of the patio. It’s the largest pot display I’ve done yet, and probably will ever have.
Despite its size and sheer presence, I always get a sense of fleeting and transience when I’m around the patio pots. Their number means an automatic watering system would be  prohibitive and unable to cover every pot there is. I don’t fancy spending the whole summer watering by hand either. A sprinkler is out of the question since we’re on a water meter and many of the plants won’t like being cooped in pots for long. It’s purely pragmatic reasons like these which mean there will likely never be a similar display once these pots have been dealt with.
Nearly all the pots are expected to be planted out somewhere, eventually. They’re all waiting on me to create the borders and dig the beds and reclaim the various neglected areas of the garden. At that point, I’ll walk back and forth across the collection of pots and pick the ones I want to plant out and so place them permanently in their new “home”. This is just what I did with that front border; gaps in the display briefly opened up as I removed a few clematis and roses but a quick shuffle of surrounding pots into those gaps and they were never there.
As I pick away at the patio pots, systematically planting them this display will gradually erode until there are just a handful of pots left so lets look at a few pictures of this display before it disappears altogether.
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