Breathe life into your alfresco with potted plants

Floor plant pots and planter boxes can take up valuable floor space that is better spent housing beautiful furniture, and allowing for movement and play in your outdoor area. Instead, look upwards - hanging plants are a beautiful way of adding colour and life to your outdoor space without taking up any of those valuable square feet. 

Australia’s native Diuris (or Donkey Orchid) is a great all-rounder, or add colour with beautiful blooms such as fuchsias, impatiens (great for the shade!), petunias (if you have some sun to spare) and geraniums. Maidenhair ferns appreciate a cool shady area, and pothos, silver fall dianthus or string of pearls succulents can create a beautiful trailing effect from suspended pots. 

It’s likely that you’ll have a lot of shaded space on your pergola, which may be hard to adorn with sun-loving plants. Thankfully, ferns and palms adore shady, moist and humid conditions, meaning your darkest, shadiest corners could thrive as a beautiful tropical scene. 

Ferns and palms provide luscious and plentiful green foliage to freshen up your outdoor space, and they can grow to a fuller size, which makes them ideal for a larger outdoor area. Palms can grow to be tall and hold most of their foliage above eye level, drawing the eye upwards. This can make your outdoor area look taller and more spacious. 
Other tropical plants can be used to compliment the tropical theme palms and ferns provide - Strelizia (Bird of paradise) plants, Peace lilies, zanzibar gem (zz plant) and Ficust Lyriata (Fiddle leaf fig) all provide lush green foliage that create a sense of harmony. 

A large cluster of pots with tropical palms, ferns and mosses can create a truly luxurious appearance.

Topiary is the practice of clipping the foliage and twigs of trees into well-manicured shapes. Neat topiaries look great either side of doors and windows, their clipped appearance creating an uncluttered but effective look. Topiaries can act as a vertical element on your patio, adding height without the heaviness of a regular tree. Topiary can elevate your space with a classic, heritage look, or be used as a modern element to bring the wow factor to your entertaining space.

Fruiting trees are a beautiful option if you are looking for a plant that gives back! Dwarf varieties can be beautiful, and although they don’t provide fruits, ornamental fruit trees are a favourite in landscaping too. 

The sunlight in your space will have the largest effect on what fruit trees will best thrive in your space. Bright, sunlit areas are best for citruses like orange, lemon and cumquat, or olive trees. Shadier areas are great for dwarf pink lady apple, fig and nectarine trees. Consider espaliering your fruit trees against a wall, on a lattice or using tension wires for maximum effect while taking up minimum floor space!

You’ve finally got the posts, so it’s time to start growing some climbers! Climbers are a great way to adorn the columns that hold up your verandah or pergola – or you can erect a trellis between posts and train plants up that. You can plant climbers in the ground or in containers beside the post or trellis you want it to climb. For a simple, modern and fragrant solution, star jasmine has rich green leaves with beautifully fragrant flowers in shaded of white and yellow. Potato vines look similar to jasmine, producing a less fragrant flower and growing at almost twice the speed!

Wisteria and bougainvillea are also popular choices, although both need a bit more support and maintenance, and although their stems require more support, their established appearance more than makes up for their neediness!

Grape vines can be grown up columns and along roof lines to create a beautiful, leafy green frame for your entertaining area. Common in wineries and in the greek isles, grapevines can add a truly luxurious finish to your pergola. 

Whatever plant you choose, you don’t have to limit yourself to just having them grow up your columns! lattices and support wires can be used to enclose your space and create a truly stunning trellis statement, and plants can grow up and over open pergola structures to create a leafy green canopy. 
 

A vibrant collection of simple potted flowers can make an enormous impact on your pergola. You can group them all in one large pot, or create a varied cluster of pots with different species in each one. 

Shade-loving impatiens are great for pergola decorations. Camellias, azaleas and begonias are also great choices. If commitment isn’t your thing, seasonal flowers like violets, petunias and snapdragons can create a gorgeous cottage look. If you’re not interested in replanting every year, you could opt for Hydrangeas - a large plant that produce larger-than-life blooms, whose colour you can change from blue, to purple or pink by adjusting the acidity of the soil! Create a truly stand-out effect by clustering variants in a similar colour palette, shades of purple, pink or simply a variety of white flowers can create a cohesive and elevated look.

Summer is the best time to spend under your pergola or verandah – until the mosquitoes start pestering you. And while you can douse your skin and clothes in mosquito repellent, there are better (not to mention cheaper and more environmentally-friendly) ways of keeping the mozzies away, than with naturally mosquito and insect repelling plants! Many of these plants are beautiful too, simply pop them in a pot and place them around the areas you’re most likely to spend time around on a hot summer’s day. Some of the best natural mosquito-repelling plants include citronella, lemon eucalyptus, rosemary, lemongrass, peppermint, geraniums, verbena, and lavender.

As with fruit trees and natural mozzie repellents, it’s worthwhile decorating your pergola or verandah with pot plants that will yield more than one use. For some truly multipurpose plants, you need look no further than herbs! Herbs can provide wonderful, relaxing fragrances on your pergola, can be clipped and added to recipes, and can look great too. Indispensable herbs to furnish your pergola include basil, thyme, coriander, parsley, and chives, as well as the mozzie reducing varieties of rosemary, lemongrass and mint.

Succulents, with leaves that act like spongey water storage units, are ideal for your pergola or verandah. They require very little work, sun, or water. They also have a striking, ornamental appearance. Agave and bromeliads are popular and easy-to-grow succulents that have an interesting appearance, and come in a variety of colours. As well as looking stunning on their own, succulents look incredible when clustered together or used as supplementary foliage among other plants, just remember to group plants in pots with similar water needs.

What happens if you struggle to keep pot plants flourishing under shelter? If you just don’t have the green thumb, that shouldn’t mean your verandah or pergola must stay bare. Whether you have thriving garden beds or reliable florists nearby, you can always use cuttings of fresh blooms to place in vases around your outdoor space, or cut branches from nearby trees or bushes to give your verandah or pergola a lived-in, cottage feel that’s sure to make you feel at home.

Vertical Gardens and wall planters and a stunning way to add colour and foliage to your patio without taking up any precious floor space. Made as sparsely or as densely as you like, wall planters can create a lush, tropical feel or be planted separately with fragrant herbs and flowers for a rustic country feel. You can even use the space from a vertical garden to create a veggie garden with plants like lettuce, spinach and cherry tomatoes.