UK Edition
The 6 best containers for small urban gardens
A heatwave laid its sticky, heavy palm over the country this week, but in the days before change could be felt in the air. The dawns were slower, a lethargic pull of orange sun above the city, the days shorter. A sense of crispness to the mornings. September is coming, and it's my favourite time of the year.
There's something about new beginnings ingrained in my mind about September. And while I've managed to shift my childhood craving for new pencil cases, there's a new term feeling on the balcony. Summer's annuals – the trumpeting petunias and overflowing geraniums – have become wild and leggy despite my improved vigilance this year, and the Osteospurmum are gasping for their last breath.
But before giving that lot a trim and putting up other plants, container gardeners have bigger thinking to do. When a garden's beds can be moved and reshaped, the end any season heralds new opportunities for changing things up a little. After a summer spent sat on the balcony, it's especially tempting to move things around.
I've spent the past year on a mission to source and find containers that work in my narrow, concrete-walled space. Most containers stocked in garden centres are for gardens, and can be too large for urban spaces. When room is at a premium, things can become cluttered easily and there's also budget to be considered.
Here are the best planters and containers for small spaces (and rookie gardeners) I've found so far:
1. Bay and Box
London company Bay and Box work for small urban spaces because that's what they were designed for: the windowsills of Victorian houses. But despite living in a 1950s block of flats, I've found their windowboxes and containers stylish, versatile and lightweight. The slim width means I can perch one on top of a gas metre and another on a table, but they're deep enough to get a crop of winter leaves and radishes going. They come in a variety of understated colours, too.
2. Elho
If you keep an eye on other people's balconies, you will have spotted Elho's tubs. Based on a reservoir system, these brightly coloured plastic pots have grooves cut into the bottom to perch them on balcony railings.
I prefer the more streamlined aesthetics of the Barcelona range, which come with a bracket that hooks onto railings, meaning no planting space is compromised and less intrusion on existing architecture. If you're not planting in it, you can store the bracket and move the pot elsewhere (the bracket also fits inside the container so you stash the whole lot in a cupboard, if you wish). They come in all colours of the rainbow, although I plumped for grey to match my other pots, and the reservoir looks after thirsty plants if you're away for the weekend.
3. Resin containers
I found these online last winter after what felt like an endless search for lightweight, tasteful tubs. In a small contemporary space, tubs with detailing can look fussy and out of place. The alternative – usually "urban" shiny black things with slanted sides – tend to suggest you are landscaping a spacious, expensive rooftop bar rather than a home.
The lava charcoal cubes gave a happy middle ground: the mottled effect is more sympathetic for changeable planting and domestic surroundings and, unlike metal or terracotta planters, the hybrid material retains water and puts up with the harsh conditions sometimes experienced 60ft in the air. Plus, they're lightweight, which means that even though I've got 50 litres of compost in each, they can be shuffled around.
4. The trusty tin can
When I first started gardening on the balcony I had a growing tin can obsession. I blame Pinterest, with its endless photos of happy basil plants in artfully aged tomato cans, almost entirely, although my limited budget had something to do with it too.
Two-and-a-half years on and I'm down to just two tin cans after gathering more than five times that. One is an artfully aged tomato can from a local pizzeria, home to a remarkably tolerant geranium, the other is a huge oil can carried across London on the tube, which currently has some ophiopogon nigrescens in at the moment but works for bulbs that need depth, too.
The tin can works but you will need to find someone with an angle-grinder to chop the top off the bigger ones and drill to make drainage holes – take those upcycling blogs that suggest you can do it with a hammer and nail with a trowel of salt. As for the artful aging, well, time and the elements will be your friend there.
5. The zinc tub
The zinc tub is not a permanent option, nor is it always enormously easy or cheap to find. However, smaller ones are pleasingly light and have put up with a year of weather bashing on the ledge of my balcony. Tempting as those antique agricultural drinking troughs are, they do tend to be massive. If you're set on the real deal, scour eBay – although there are lots of convincingly fake aged alternatives, which leads me on to...
6. Wall planters
I've written before about the need to go up, rather than out, with small growing spaces and discovering zinc wall planters this year has given me two new small flowerbeds in the sky. I'm particularly fond of these vintage-styled zinc bucket planters because they are light but sturdy and, unlike terracotta, which has proved fatal in the past, don't dry out too quickly. They don't come with drainage holes, but the zinc is thin enough to be punctured with a nail and hammer. They're just deep enough to fill with crocuses and muscari for the new year.
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