I'd like to talk just a little bit about beautiful edible container gardens. To me, this is an exciting idea. Maybe you only have a front porch or a front walkway to use for your container garden - and you want it to be pretty. Or maybe you want to express your creativity in this manner, or you would just enjoy having a beautiful container garden, even if it isn't visible to anyone but you. Now, I'm fortunate in having a lot of room on the deck and in the back yard that isn't visible from the street, but I also like to have some decorative containers on our front porch and walk. So I'm interested in this idea on a personal level too. It's also an exciting idea for me because it really wasn't something I had given any serious consideration to until reading Bountiful Container recently. Many people (like me, until recently) probably don't realize that they can have both: containers that are decorative as well as productive. I have a lot of experience in growing edible plants and I'm, therefore, fairly confident about growing plants. But I'm not naturally good at making things *pretty* and I have very little experience in creating decorative container gardens, so maybe we can learn together.

Bountiful Container taught me that a beautiful container arrangement can consist of several containers grouped together (believe it or not, I hadn't thought of that before) and that sometimes it's useful to place your containers so that they are at different levels, and the book discusses various means of creating different levels for containers. It also has 22 "theme gardens" - with lists of included plants, a drawing, and directions on how to arrange the plants. I regard these more as inspiration than as direct recipes to follow - although they could certainly be closely followed, with (I'm sure) excellent results.

I watch a PBS show called P. Allen Smith's Garden Home. Smith is a professional garden designer, and his emphasis is on decorative gardens, of course, but the same principles apply to both edible and decorative gardening, especially when it comes to design. He creates a container on each show, and has a "3-shape rule" that sounds really easy: even I could do this! Here's his recipe:

"Designing containers for your garden is easy to do if you follow my easy 3-shape rule - use a combination of plants that fit into one of these three basic shapes: tall and spiky; round and full; low and cascading. These three basic forms complement one another so well that it doesn't really matter if the plants eventually bloom. This allows you to use plants that have great looking foliage as well as those with colorful flowers." (http://www.pallensmith.com/newsletter/2002/news_101102a.htm)

In this connection, I would also like to mention the series of books by Rosalind Creasy: The Edible Whatever Garden (for Whatever, substitute Flower, Rainbow, Asian, Italian, Mexican, Herb, etc.). Creasy is not primarily a container gardener, but her books are full of gorgeous photographs of beautiful edible gardens. If they don't cause you to fall into a state of complete and utter despair because your garden will never look like that, they may well be inspiring and useful to you. (Remember, Creasy has a staff of paid helpers to work on her gardens, she lives in California where it appears that everything grows beautifully, and she is obviously a very skilled professional garden designer and photographer.) I think it's very good to see what the plants actually look like in growth, and helps you picture what your containers can become.

Summing up, here are just a few things to think about if you want your container garden to be beautiful as well as edible:
1. You can do it.
2. You can group containers - you aren't required to put all the plants in one container.
3. The containers can be at different levels.
4. And remember Smith's "3-shape rule" - use plants that are tall and spiky, round and full, and something that will cascade over the edge. (These aren't necessarily all in the same container either.)
5. And, of course, you can mix non-edible flowers or foliage plants with your edible plants, if you wish.