Instant hanging garden

A hanging basket is a thing of beauty, but it requires planning, hard work, an eye for detail and a lot of care and attention to keep just one hanging happily for a season.

Perhaps that's why more and more gardeners opt for the easy – if costly – way out, by buying in hanging baskets, ready planted and filled with healthy flowers.Garden centres, nurseries, even local authorities, now offer such a service.

You pay your money, state your preference, and wait until June when

the fear of frost has vanished.

For your money, you get an instant miniature garden without all the fuss of having to buy a container, obtain plants, compost and slow-release fertiliser, and then having to put them all together yourself. But while the hanging basket revolution has meant an end to the drudgery, it has not meant an end to the aftercare. Anything living in a container knows the constraints imposed.

If the gardener doesn't feed and water regularly; if the gardener doesn't remove fading blooms and replace the dead and dying, then it's all a waste of money.

Hanging baskets need constant care to live up to the great expectations heaped upon them by the modern container gardener.

And if the modern container gardener can grasp that, then summer should be a wonderfully colourful time.

And with bedding plants now so cheap and easily obtainable, it should be simple enough to create your own stunning micro-gardens on the end of a chain.

Rules to remember are:

Ensure that the basket is securely held.

Use the best compost you can, add a slow-release fertiliser and, if possible, water-absorbing granules to help

drying out.

Use only healthy plants.

Use a liner to hold in the compost and moisture.

After planting, water well and continue to water at least once a week, sometimes twice and perhaps even daily.

Apply a weak, soluble feed at least once a week (even better, apply every time you water).

There is no secret to having a successful hanging basket. Your horizons are governed by the size of the container and the number of plants you can persuade it to hold. The fashion is still to use a variety of flowers, but purists insist that a single species is far easier to plant up and can look even more stunning than a crowded basket where numerous different flowers are fighting one another for space and recognition. So instead of baskets brimming with lobelia, petunias, pelargoniums, antirrhinums, trailing ivies and trailing fuchsias, you can have a basket filled with nasturtiums or charm chrysanthemums.

The single-plant theme allows the gardener to hang baskets in sites and situations where summer bedding plants could not tolerate the conditions. Heathers can withstand winds and shade far better than sun-loving marigolds; pansies will continue to flower in

shade when verbenas will have

given up the ghost.

The financial advantages are obvious –

no need to buy or raise from seed several different varieties of plants.

The one-plant theory opens the possibility of all-year-round hanging baskets.

Some hardy heathers do their flowering in winter, and many ivies are tough enough to withstand the worst weather.

YP MAG 8/5/10