Wherever you sit in your garden, be it just outside the kitchen door or at the far end of a winding path, you must have pots. Lots of pots. Spanish patios are crammed with pots and that is, without doubt, the right approach. I don’t really buy into the minimalist idea of one perfectly placed pot, at least on a patio. Less is always less when it comes to terracotta.
But terracotta pots are expensive so it is important to use them to their maximum effect. This means either using plants that have a long season, such as pelargoniums, pansies or fuchsias, or having at least two quite separate plantings each year, which works well for bigger pots.
In high summer, I like to mix big, dramatic plants such as cannas or grasses with dahlias, cosmos, petunias, zinnias or whatever will flower repeatedly into autumn, and then replace these with a mass of
