Garden Planters: Bring the garden indoors, or explore container gardening on your patio

~ Garden Planters and Container Gardens~

Garden Planters: A General Overview

In nearly every modern home one can find an example of the garden planter filled with a choice selection of flora to help decorate and alter the flow of the home and garden area.  Planters can be created out of just about any container in the world.  There are milk jug planters used by the eco-friendly home, and toilet bowl planters placed in the lawns of those with a sense of humor.  Time has shown all really needed in the garden planter world is a little ingenuity and effort to create a successful garden planter. 

Planters, as mentioned before, are useful both indoors and outdoors.  Many enjoy gardening but lack space or are restricted by their zoning laws.  Garden planters can allow these green thumbs to bring plants back into their lives.  There’s no law that states you have to have decorative flora in your garden planter, you can certainly grow a tomato plant in one and use it as the centerpiece on your kitchen table if you like.

In fact those utilizing garden planters indoors have discovered that a whole new way to divide and accent space is opened up to them.  Garden planters make effective tools in interior design.  Place a series of tall potted ferns in a large square room to create an organic artificial divide.   Or set up a few growing philodendrons in prominent places and you may find that conversation is filled with the progress of those little plants.  A boy’s room certainly looks a bit stark at times and you can easily enhance it with a planter filled with tall broad leafed plants in the corner.  Plus by having him take care of it you are teaching him something about responsibility and he may even bond a bit with the plant though he’ll probably never admit that.

Contemporary architecture tends to create a lot if niches in and around the home that allows for the placement of smaller items and potted plants.  This may be a part of what has allowed the popularity of garden planters to skyrocket. Garden planters in turn come in just about any shape and size to fill these niches.  They help us to create the atmosphere in a room, alter the flow of traffic through a room, act as conversation starters and are just plain decorative.

Possibly the idea of the garden planter started way back when California was still a part of Mexico and the United States was growing at an ever increasing pace.  The housing out west at the time envisioned the patio as a kind of enclosed space, four walls and no roof.  Naturally vines and other plants grew along the inside of these walled spaces and many patios of the time were filled with garden plants and orange trees.  Or maybe it goes even further back to the time of the Romans and their central courtyards, an opening created when a home was built in a square with a roofless section in the middle.  In these courtyards were pools with overhanging roofs designed to catch the rainwater.  Invariably plants grew in these container water gardens.  However it happened the idea of bringing the outdoors in caught on and spread like wildfire.