How to Plant The Perfect Fall Container Garden
It’s officially fall, and creative container arrangements let us celebrate the season in effortless style. It may be the most fun (and easiest) time of year to enhance seasonal motifs with gifts from the garden. Join gardening expert Katherine Rowe in a look at potted combinations tailored to autumn’s moods.
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Fall, in its casual, natural beauty, brings boundless creativity when it comes to container garden designs. It’s the perfect time to play with color, texture, and form, from trees and shrubs to flowering perennials and annuals. Blending herbs and vegetables into the ornamental display, along with natural elements, highlights autumnal themes.
Potted arrangements emphasize prominent spaces like the front door, garden gate, walkways, or seating areas, where we can enjoy the features up close. Create a single focal point, symmetrical designs, or clustered containers of varying sizes for seemingly effortless and inviting beauty.
Flowering plants that bridge late summer heat and frosty conditions serve not only interesting designs but also draw pollinators like birds, honeybees, butterflies, moths, and other beneficial insects. They provide pollen, nectar, and seeds as other bloomers fade.
With fall comes a cornucopia of material, from dynamic foliage to a profusion of blooms, making pots and container gardens overflow with artful charm. This season, have fun creating potted arrangements without overthinking the composition. Bring in color, texture, and natural elements for layered appeal, from traditional mums to a broad selection of other seasonal stars.
Getting Started
To give container plants a headstart, employ a high-quality, well-draining potting mix. Good air circulation is essential, so allow space between walls and structures and a little breathing room between clustered pots.
Containers tend to dry out more quickly than in-ground plantings and usually benefit from consistent moisture. For the best growth, water when soil is dry to a depth of two inches, during dry spells, and through frost. Topdress with a layer of mulch to help insulate roots and retain moisture.
Fall Container Garden Inspiration and Themes
- Single or Grouped Specimens – Create either a single focal point or a clustered grouping of varying sizes. Accent a large pot with a series of small containers. Hanging baskets and window boxes, too, introduce a vertical element and tie the house, deck, or porch to the rest of the garden.
- Play With Color – From monochromatic schemes to pastels to bright hues, the look isn’t limited to autumnal hues, though always warm and welcoming.
- Versatile Plants – create changeable displays that move from autumn into winter; use annuals along with anchoring evergreens and perennials to vary the seasonal displays
- Incorporate Garden Material – natural elements add visual interest while keeping things simple; pumpkins, gourds, fresh and dried florals, and unique seed pods punch up the container display
- Consider Pot Styles – fall is an anything-goes natural vibe; bring in rustic elements like basketry, terracotta, colorful glazes, and unconventional accents to tailor the seasonal arrangement
High Texture and Color
This grouping overflows with contrasting textures and bright, rich tones in flower and foliage. It relies on perennials, the workhorses in enhancing fall appeal, with late-season blooms that extend color until frost.
Feature the season’s specialties, like asters in blue-purple, echinacea, and chrysanthemums in harvest tones. Use annuals like celosia and ornamental kale to embellish the anchoring perennials.
Ornamental grasses like Hakone in chartreuse and pennisetum in purple bring fine texture and vivid colors. Natives like muhly and carex shine during the season in plumes and blades, adding texture and movement to the look. Instead of cutting them back, keep grasses intact through the winter to enjoy their graceful forms, even dried, and unique seed heads. They also provide forage for birds and shelter for wildlife.
Monochromatic Blend
Repetition through specimen and color makes this composition simple and crisp. With a few mixed elements, there’s overlap using a monochromatic scheme. Monochromatic designs rely on a single color in various hues, shades, and tints.
Repeating the same color is an easy way to harmonize the look, unifying the aesthetic while adding interest through varying light and dark shades. A mix of form and texture makes the design dynamic.
This mix of textures uses drying ornamental grass, gourds, and potted mums. Dried hydrangeas add a pale lime contrast that remains neutral while concealing the pots and blending the setup.
Bright Annuals and Vegetables
Using a “thriller, filler, and spiller” schematic, this fall container garden has vertical interest balanced with a lush, full base of mixed specimens. Cordyline brings a tall spray of fine-bladed foliage. Look for ‘Purple Sensation’ or ‘Red Star’ for a central fountain of deeply toned blades. Black and blue salvia (Salvia guaranitica) has cobalt tubular bloom spikes in late summer into fall. Red twig dogwood stems add upright texture and color.
The thrillers are banked on one side with vibrant leafy greens of Swiss chard. Varieties like ‘Bright Lights,’ Peppermint,’ and ‘Celebration’ have brightly colored stems and rich leaves that are soft and tasty. This edible bridges the vegetable and ornamental display.
Ornamental peppers offer a pop of red, orange, and yellow cones that transition as they mature. Annuals like coleus in magenta and calibrachoa in sunny yellow brighten the whole entity. Calendula, pansies, and violas would offer frost-tolerant filler options.
Tropical Flair
Tropical plants, in their jewel tones of the season, complement autumnal arrangements. Use these indoors to brighten the theme and outdoors if your season is warm or pots are in a protected area where temperatures don’t drop below the low forties.
Zebra plant (Aphelandra squarrosa), flaming sword (Vriesea splendens), and kalanchoe (Kalanchoe blossfeldiana) complement the mums and kale of this collection. Crotons and bromeliads would make other tropical additions for dynamic foliage.
Sedum like ‘Autumn Fire’ or “Night Embers’ would make a hardy perennial stand-in with autumn flowering. Mangave (look for the Art and Soul series like ‘Lavender Lady’) makes a striking foliar contrast in mild climates like zones 8 through 10.
Suspend Planter Boxes
Hanging baskets, window boxes, and railing planters are versatile options to add vertical dimension, especially in small spaces and porches and patios. This suspended coir planter incorporates annual bloomers spanning summer and fall with natural elements from the garden to tailor the theme.
Dried magnolia leaves, miniature pumpkins, and an infill of seasonal color carry the combination. Chrysanthemums, lingering lantana, and celosia of varying plume texture and color convey the autumnal notes.
Feature Specimens
The focal point of stately chrysanthemums and ornamental grasses punctuate this classic mum and pumpkin combination. While the focal points remain symmetrical in color and form, the remaining stair-step mums vary in bold colors that mix and match as repeated specimens.
Varying mum colors and differences in pumpkin tones and sizes help achieve pleasing asymmetrical balance (rather than overly precise, redundant arranging). A little more natural with the appropriate scale (i.e., large mums and pumpkins in the mix) yields an abundant look and makes this a winner for a traditional selection. Topiary evergreens anchor the seasonal coordinates.
Soft Palette
Soft neutrals in vintage shades create a warm ambiance that’s on trend this season. Analogous colors (next to each other on the color wheel) naturalize beautifully for a visually harmonious arrangement.
Using analogous shades in garden design means incorporating light and dark variations, like pinks, apricots, golds, and deep reds – and everything in between as you choose. As long as the colors are in the same family, they’ll blend successfully. The look of analogous schemes can be warm or cool, depending on the selection of adjacent colors.
The windowbox display here adapts to any planter style. The buff neutrals of stonecrop and coral bells complement scarlet mums. The range of tawny pinks to deep red offers a nostalgic invitation to the season. Heuchera ‘Peachberry Ice,’ ‘Georgia Peach,’ ‘Caramel,’ and ‘Plum Pudding’ are right in time for this look.
Embellish With Cold-Hardy Annuals
Cool season annuals are a swift way to add extensive color to fall container gardens. They’ll start in fall, and when little else is blooming in winter, extend the pop of cheer we crave. These clustered bowls of Heuchera and pansies are simple but lovely, leading into winter.
Frost-tolerant annuals like violas and pansies offer reliable bloom performance in boundless shades. Snapdragons, ornamental kale, calendula, poppies, and bachelor buttons are other flowering annuals that provide either lasting winter color or a burst of cool-season blooms, depending on your climate.
Go Dark
Autumn is ideal for relishing dark reds, purples, burgundy, and wine flowers and foliage. Add a little moody drama with deep silvery-purple ornamental cabbage amongst rich blooms and contrasting leaf textures. ‘Color Up Purple,’ ‘Osaka Red,’ and ‘Pigeon Purple’ bring velvety royal hues in full rosettes. Ornamental kale, often thick-leaved, frilly, and feathery, also offers dark contrast. ‘Redbor’ in deep burgundy frills takes center stage.
Here, chrysanthemums and ornamental cabbage shine among geraniums and other late bloomers. The fine silver foliage of Helichrysum offers a unique texture. Dusty miller (Senecio cineraria) or lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantina) are good additions as frost-tolerant silver-flocked leaves.
Accent With Ornamental Edibles
Showy fruits, vegetables, greens, and grains with ornamental qualities are perfect for a fresh take on fall container garden styling. While technically edible, ornamental selections are best enjoyed for their good looks. In this combination, ornamental millet provides high vertical interest while ornamental peppers, cabbage, and mums fill the foundation.
Ornamental millet ‘Purple Majesty’ (Pennisetum glaucum) is deep purple-black with matching dark grains. Amaranth (Amaranthus spp.) is another dramatic scene-stealer with tassel flowers in burgundy, gold, coral, or magenta that drape from arching stems. ‘Coral Fountain’ features ropes of trailing blooms, and ‘Red Spike’ arches gracefully in deep red.
Amaranth and ornamental millet offer high-protein forage for birds if seeds are left to dry on the stem. They add spectacular color and texture to fresh and dried floral designs.
The thick, showy leaves of ornamental cabbage and kale create textural variety in rosettes of green, creamy white, deep pink, purple, and red. Color intensifies in cool temperatures, transitioning from green to rich, saturated pigments as summer turns to fall. Pair these with other leafy vegetables, like bright lettuces and Swiss chard, along with seasonal bloomers.
Ornamental peppers give a burst of color and range in size from long candles to rounded pearls; some are fiery, while others are dark in chocolate and mahogany. ‘Black Pearl’ is an All-America Selections winner with black foliage to match its shiny, round fruits. Peppers age from black to red for added interest.
Another AAS winner is ‘Candlelight,’ with bundles of upright, slender fruits in green, orange, and red. A single plant produces more than a hundred bright peppers.
Rustic Elements
Autumn motifs are made more fall-ish with items characteristic of the season. Fresh harvests, nuts, gourds, fallen leaves, and twigs highlight the theme. Natural containers like wood and baskets lend themselves to the transitioning fall season, and rustic garden accessories complement the naturalistic, elevated feel.
In this outdoor, table-top theme, bright tones combine with earthy elements for a blended display. As the harvest season, incorporating fresh fruits like apples and pears into a potted display is fitting. The aesthetic is loose, vibrant, and alive.
