Pots of stylish ideas

I've been meaning to write this blog up for over a month now, but while the Garden Museum's displays of stylish pots is long since gone I think the ideas are still valid. There's been some great events organised by the Garden Museum in London and I thought their fund-raising event selling off pots planted up by designers and gardening media was particularly inspired. It was full of ideas and James Alexander-Sinclair's lively auction was great fun and raised £8,000, which will help pay for this year's intern at the museum, Matt Collins. Museum director Christopher Woodward approached a number of high-profile designers including Tom Stuart-Smith, Andy Sturgeon and Arabella Lennox-Boyd, as well as names in the media, such as Gardeners' World presenter Joe Swift, guerilla gardener Richard Reynolds and me (to represent Gardens Illustrated).

We were all given the same style pot, a simple cube made of concrete reinforced with plant fibre (supplied by Capital Gardens), but were free to plant up as we wished. It was fascinating to see how everyone faced up to this rather public challenge and I've included a selection  of the pots below:

Top row (left to right): Andy Sturgeon and Arabella Lennox-Boyd; Matt Collins; Richard Reynolds.
Bottom row (left to right): Tom Stuart-Smith; John Brookes and Juliet Roberts.

Here's some additional images of the plants used in the Gardens Illustrated pot. 

I'm a bit of a textile junky, so took my inspiration from the rich, muted tones of old tapestries. I particularly like combining umbellifers, grasses and daisy-like flowers and chose  a mix of drought-tolerant plants in purples, grey-greens and orange tones. The coreopsis has a particularly interesting flower (wine-red surrounded by a ruff of pale lemon-yellow) and will continue blooming into late summer. The gaura's long-lasting rose-pink flowers will add increasing lightness as the season progresses. Sedum 'Matrona's succulent leaves provide a bit of texture and as its soft pink flowers emerge in August-September it will alter the colour balance yet again.

Purple sage
Gaura lindheimeri 'Pink Dwarf'
Sedum 'Matrona'
Stipa arundinacea
Bupleurum longifolium

_{Blog by editor Juliet Roberts}