Don’t put away your flower pots and containers just yet! The holidays are coming up quickly, and it’s time to get festive with fancy decorations. Get your containers ready for the winter with this helpful guide on building gorgeous containers using materials from your garden, ornaments, and fresh greenery.
Select Your Container
Choosing a suitable container is essential to ensuring your design survives the winter. Luckily, practicality doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice beauty! There are plenty of durable planter options available that are as gorgeous as they are reliable. Garden containers made of metal, concrete, wood, and fiberglass typically handle freezes well; thin plastic and terracotta are more likely to crack during the freeze, so keep those in storage until spring.
You can decorate your raised flower beds or window boxes as well! Our fundamentals of designing porch pots can translate across your yard and home if you get a little creative.
Start Collecting Materials from Your Chicago Garden
Be generous with the natural materials you use to enhance your garden planter. A planter looks best with different combinations of color and texture and an abundant number of decorations inside. You can create an eye-catching and decadent holiday garden display with live evergreens, berries, and seasonal accents. If you’re looking for some inspiration on what precisely those natural materials are, here are some suggestions that you might be able to collect straight from your garden:
- Evergreen cuttings
- Red twig dogwood branches
- Magnolia branches
- Twigs from berry shrubs
- Winter holly
- Pine cones
- Birch or aspen branches
- Dried hydrangea panicles or mopheads
Use the Thriller, Filler, Spiller Method to Build Your Masterpiece
Most beautiful container garden and flower pot designs share a magic formula known as the “thriller, filler, spiller” method. When you create a design that uses a few of each, you get a beautiful, well-balanced container! You can apply this to any container in your yard, porch, or home.
Thrillers: Build a Focal Point
Every planter needs a bold focal point or a “thriller,” which is the anchor to the rest of the design. It’s the main attraction! Large ornaments or decorations, tall grasses, birch branches, and even evergreen boughs are excellent thrillers, depending on how you use them. For thrillers, think of height and size.
For example, try using two or three birch branches of different lengths and sticking them into the soil of your planter. Arrange them accordingly so that they are the focal point of your planter, and place some ornamental grasses around them to fill in the gaps and add lots of height. Now you have a great focal point to start and can move on to the next step.
Fillers: Add Substance
Fillers are any components that are short, bushy, and can fill space in your container. Short cuttings of fresh greenery, types of hydrangea mopheads, twigs of berries, and pinecones are all fantastic options to fill your planter. They don’t compete with your thriller but help accentuate it instead!
Spillers: Balance is Key
You have lots of height and width with your thrillers and fillers; now it’s time to add some components that spill over the sides of your container, such as soft evergreen boughs from your garden or holly. You can also use ribbons and holiday accessories for this part to balance out the container overall.
Finish with Embellishments and Accessories
Greenery and plants play a significant role in beautifying your winter planters, but you can pull all the elements together with whimsical features and accessories for the holiday season. Give your planters a completed look with colorful bows, string lights, twine, stars, lotus pods, spray-painted twigs, candy canes, and letter signs. If it makes your heart happy and your holidays brighter, you can build it into your design!
Getting your containers ready for winter is easy with us on your side! Visit us at Platt Hill Nursery in Bloomingdale and Carpentersville for more winter container garden ideas near you. We’d love to help you find the missing pieces to your design or help you choose your materials!
Platt Hill Nursery is Chicago’s premier garden center and nursery.