Dave Smith wrote:
As I'm thumbing through the home and garden magazines I see some
pretty
amazing back yards, but I don't see any hanging plants. Why is this?
Is
it a no-no once you get serious about the back yard?
As a generality hanging baskets are high maintenance & temporary. They
often end up used more or less like bouquets, purchased in full glory as
prepared in hothouses where they were speed-grown, over-fertilized, &
trained, only to be shocked to find themselves outdoors dangling from some
purchaser's porch eaves baking in the sun, thus already failing a week
later, all too soon to be discarded.
Many of the plants chosen for baskets are annuals or tropicals furthering
the temporariness of what is little more than a bouquet. Sensitive
fuchsias rather than discarded can be given all the high-maintainence
attention they require in baskets, then as they fade, removed to be hidden
away when out of season, & not brought back into view until the
following spring. But unless deeply in love with fuchsias, this can seem
like too much specialized work, labor that doesn't benefit the garden at
large.
For just such reasons they are indeed slightly deplored by serious
gardeners & landscapers who want more-or-less permanent features, that
don't need to be watered twice a day, that won't get grubby-looking at
high summer & vanish utterly in winter. A hanging basket in winter is
either a blank or an eyesoar & would not be highlighted in winter issues
of gardening magazines.
A lot of hanging baskets are frankly tacky -- plastic, two predictable
wood designs, or cheap metal frames with pete mats to hold in some dirt --
& it's just not easy to find good ones that are at least inoffensive. In
some quarters, every house needs a mezuzah, but the ones down at the
dimestore are all made out of molded plastic & look like crap, while the
"fancier" ones are just kitsch objects, hardly reminiscent of anything
sacred. So too hanging baskets, 99 out of 100 of them are so shitty it's
just pathetic that people keep hanging them from the eaves.
They are too often used to "tart up" the tin porches of trailer houses,
while at the "high end" they are associated with lamp-post decorations in
would-be tourist traps & are the outdoor equivalent of ferns in taverns
attempting against all odds to pass themselves off as more than sleezy
bars.
There is also the pathos factor of windowboxes & hanging baskets used by
people who want to garden but have no place to do so, or are trying to
disguise the ugliness of a house with a few failing petunias. All too
often a hanging basket is not much higher up the ladder of taste than a
christmas wreathe of pinecones glue-gunned on a circle of cardboard, or a
raised garden made inside a tractor tire. There is a bigger overlap
between vendors of christmas gimcrack & hanging baskets, than between
hanging baskets & nurseries. And those standard-issue hanging baskets of
puffy-annuals fall into a category slimilar to mums sold in hospital gift
shops in pots wrapped in shiny metallic paper.
But there certainly are exceptions, & like even the kitchiest things, it
can be done with elegance & beauty. Container gardening is an art unto
itself & hanging baskets a sub-specialty of a sub-specialty. Hanging
baskets in a warm zone with orchid cacti or dangling beed-plant
succulents, or a temperate hanging basket with variegated Vinca major or
Appleberry vines or ornate dwarf ivy in the mix, can in some cases require
no more maintenance than any other garden component, & can even have a
degree of permanency rather than just be throw-away flowers.
-paghat the ratgirl
--
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