Recently, my garden fantasies have extended to a table. Specifically, one of those substantial, move-it-if-you-dare stone tables, weathered beautifully with some mottling and moss, standing on gravel beneath the dappled shade of a tree.
I long for this table because, in the similarly fantastical small urban garden in my head, it is the answer to a number of problems. In the summer it hosts languorous meals, but given that even my imagination can’t conjure a British summer where we regularly dine outside, the fantasy table mostly holds plants – seasonal ones in equally elegant, weather-beaten pots.
More than a decade ago, I started out as a container gardener, first on one balcony, then another. Six years later when I finally got a garden of my own, I set about making a near-identikit container garden in the paved part in an attempt to cope with the relative expanse and fox poo. Over time, I purged my container stash, giving away anything smaller than 50cm across (they look fussy en masse, need endless watering and nourishing, and I kept tripping over them), and filling the rest with trusty perennials, such as hardy ferns, and the occasional small tree. Now, I’ve come full circle and want a clutch of pots to primp and preen.
The fantasy table is informed by other, better-known tables. Monty Don’s may be the most familiar; he fills it with gravel-topped pots of grape hyacinths, crocuses and miniature narcissi. The garden writer Laetitia Maklouf has been documenting hers on Substack. But I’m also thinking of the picnic bench at the heart of Sarah Price’s wondrous 2023 RHS Chelsea flower show garden, which bore only three pots of dark-leaved aeoniums under a statuesque Pinus sylvestris tree.
Critics say this is the fussiest form of gardening, but there is a time and place for it – specifically, when one does not have much time or space. Spring is also a good advert for the aesthetically pleasing container. This year, I crammed tulips and daffs into all of mine and I have no regrets – by repeating the same handful of varieties (narcissus ‘Thalia’, ‘Doll Baby’ and ‘Accent’, and tulips ‘Apricot Beauty’, ‘Apricot Pride’ and ‘Salmon Van Eijk’ among them) I’ve got a cohesive abundance of prettiness that I can shuffle in and out of the house without cutting anything. Once they go over, I’ll lift the bulbs and shove them into a (far uglier) plastic tub by the shed, then, come November, plant them again.
In their absence I could fill the pots with erigeron or herbs, which would flourish as the days warmed. Crucially, these are things that exist in the garden already or could be returned to it once I put the bulbs back in the pots. The table of joy is all the more so for its sustainability.