Grow a Flower Power Tower In Your Earth Tower Vertical Garden!
Flowers
Nothing can quite equal the sight of an Earth Tower in full bloom with vari-colored flowers! Choose your own color combination and enjoy its brilliant display all summer long. If you have a good sunny spot indoors, you can keep some of the flowers blooming through the winter as well.
What kinds of flowers? There’s a wide choice. Just about any of the low-growing or dwarf varieties of annuals or perennials are ideal – up to about 10 inches in height. Pinch back growing tips several times to maintain bushy growth and maximum flowering. A few trailing varieties, judiciously placed, will add interest.
Depending on your preference, you can use tints of one color – from palest pink to brightest red, or creamy yellows into orange ... or you can plan a riotous multi-hued mixture. Group several plants of each color for the best effect, and plant them closer than you would in the open garden to create a stunning blanket of color.
MORE COLOR TIPS
Place trailing flowers, such as petunias, vinca and lobelia at either end of the row. Tuck in a sprig of glossy ivy here and there to twine among the blooms.
There’s nothing like a touch of white to set off blues and reds. A few clumps of alyssum or ageratum (make sure they are the white varieties) will do wonders. Candytuff, a perennial rock garden plant, presents masses of white snowballs all spring and sprightly green foliage throughout the summer.
Click on the PDF file below to download a chart of low-growing annuals and perennials that should prosper in your Earth Tower. They are coded according to type of plant, sun needs and water needs along with the variety of colors they offer.
Those that require dryer soil should be planted at the top, where the soil dries out sooner.
Similarly, the flowers listed as requiring moist soil will thrive in the bottom half.
Perennials have a shorter blooming season; however, their lush foliage provides a good background for the flowers in bloom. You might consider using an all-perennial planting, choosing a combination of early, mid and late season flowers.
If you want a large group of shade-loving flowers, such as impatiens or wax begonias, confine them to one or two sides of the garden so you can control the amount of sun they receive.
And don’t overlook the added bonus of fragrance! Include some of the sweet-scented varieties.
If you have an outdoor garden, don’t overlook the possibility of transplanting some of these flowers into your Earth Tower. Early in the spring, bring in some of the lovely little wild violets, blue, white, purple and yellow. Portulaca, actually an annual, reseeds itself and reappears year after year, often in places where you never expect it. Transplant these “volunteers” in your Earth Tower as well. And if any of your smaller outdoor flowers become crowded, you’ll always have a place for the thinnings!
FOR A PDF REFERENCE CHART OF FLOWERS RECOMMENDED FOR YOUR EARTH TOWER GARDEN, CLICK THE ICON BELOW: