Growing for Success | Hanging baskets are back!

With the extreme heat, many people are forced to retreat from their gardens back to their patios and alfresco areas, but this doesn’t mean they have to stop gardening altogether.

Over the past couple of years, hanging baskets have made a real resurgence in popularity.

Once in the realm of grandma’s garden, they are now seen as a great way to bring colour and movement into stark, hot-looking outdoor living spaces.

Hanging baskets do require a bit of love and attention to keep them looking great, but they are an easy way of enhancing an area, and not only that, they also allow you to continue gardening when it is too hot or wet outside.

Whether you are using plastic hanging baskets, decorative wire baskets, or modern Autopot system baskets, you will need to carefully choose the types of plants suitable for the area where you are growing them and ones that also lend themselves to hanging basket culture.

Annual plants like petunias, pansies, lobelia, and viola make a great impact of colour but will need to be replaced once they have finished their display.

However, they do give the biggest hit of colour.

There is also a huge range of perennial plants that are well-suited to growing in hanging baskets and will give you stunning results.

‘Begonia Tenella’ makes a beautiful hanging basket with its large, double flowers growing upright before they get enough weight to cascade down and form a full, rounded-shaped basket.

They will continue to flower for months and hold their compact form throughout the growing season.

Once they have finished, they will need a light trim and a feed before they start flowering again.

Dichondra Silver Falls in a basket really shows off its striking silver foliage and can cascade down to about one metre before they need a trim to thicken them up.

Being a native ground cover, they can withstand periods of dryness but look best with regular watering.

‘Plectranthus Nico’ is a very popular choice of basket plant for shady areas.

Its heavily-textured leaves have a purple underside, making a great background for its lilac-tinged white flowers.

It responds well to a prune after flowering and has a natural bushy habit.

The macho fern ‘Nephrolepis biserrata’ is another choice for shady spots.

These are the large ferns that hang down in our garden centre shop.

Growing in Autopot baskets, the fronds hang down over two meters in length and are often mistaken for being artificial.

Easy to grow, they make a very impressive basket plant.

Requiring a lighter space is ‘Acalypha Stephie’, which features a prolific display of fluffy, tail-like flowers in bright crimson red.

They start flowering from late spring and continue right through the warmer months and into autumn.

With their naturally neat, compact form and lightly trailing habit, they are ideal for hanging baskets.

They can be grown as an indoor plant but do require a lighter position.

Some varieties of fuchsia plants make very stunning upright hanging baskets, but you need to be selective about the varieties you use.

Look for the smaller semi-pendulous ones whose dainty, ballerina-like flowers will dangle like small lanterns for months on end.

Geraniums like Calliope Big Red, Big White and Big Pink, as well as Ivy-Leafed Pelargoniums, are all very traditional hanging basket plants that require very little fuss.

Growing in either full sun to part shade, they are very forgiving plants.

Whatever plant you choose for your hanging basket, be sure to plant them into a good-quality potting mix.

It is the secret to success.

Hanging baskets can dry out quickly, so a potting mix that holds moisture well is essential.

With a little bit of care and maintenance, you can enjoy the pleasures of a beautiful hanging garden.

Vale Jenny Hall

On a sadder note, I would like to use this space to mention the passing of a great friend and colleague, Jenny Hall.

Some of you would know her as the plant lady who tended your office plants, as she ran our office plant hire service for years, until handing it over to Simone recently.

Others would know her as the friendly, happy lady, always ready for a chat behind the counter in the garden centre every Saturday, or as ‘The Keeper of the Cat’.

Jenny played a huge role in the Riverside Gardens story, working with us for just under 30 years.

Ever-reliable, always jovial, ready to help with whatever, whenever, and always thinking of others, she will be greatly missed.

Known to our entire Smith families, she has been a friend to all.

We would like to pass on our condolences to Dean and Glen and their families, whom she loved so much.

Thanks, Jenny; it has been a fantastic journey.