Big ideas for small garden spaces

WASHINGTON — Like many gardeners, Miriam Settles oversees a lush space full of herbs, vegetables and flowers, but all of her plants are in artfully mismatched containers, on the wooden deck of her Virginia townhouse.

“Small-space gardening is taking off in urban areas, both due to a lack of square footage and people’s busy schedules,” says Settles, who blogs at flatbottomflowers.blogspot.com. “Smaller gardens mean less time watering and fewer pests chomping on your plants,” she says.

And they can be less overwhelming. “One thing I like about gardening on the balcony is that I’m limited,” says Barron Womble. “I can only plant so much, whereas in a yard, you keep having to buy things and create different spots.”

Anna Fuhrman agrees. “A small garden is perfect for filling up and layering on,” says the Georgetown resident, who putters with her husband and daughter on a patio behind a narrow rowhouse. And then there’s small gardens’ proximity to the living space: “I can drink in all the blooms, butterflies and birds from my back window,” Fuhrman says.

• THE CONTAINER DECK GARDEN.

On summer evenings, the salsa Miriam and Greg Settles serve atop grilled fish tastes farmers-market fresh because Miriam grows her own herbs and tomatoes on their deck. “Last year was my best year ever for Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes — we easily grew hundreds of them,” says Settles, who has been tending her containers-only garden since 2002, babying heirloom roses, strawberry plants and flowers. “Anything you can plant in the ground, you can plant in a pot: broccoli, fruit, veggies.”

The growing season starts around Mother’s Day, when Settles heads out to see how her perennials and shrubs weathered the winter. She’ll prune dead branches, then go shopping. “I get plants from all different places,” she says. “… I used to turn up my nose at big-box stores, but they’ve actually gotten hip to the gardening scene. They have more varieties of herbs and a greater selection of flowers.” Settles also orders some specimens, including roses, online.

Settles’s dozens of containers — purple snapdragons in a blue ceramic pot, thyme and cilantro in a repurposed wooden wine box — are stacked on risers fashioned from other pots and bricks. This makes the deck feel layered and luxuriant, and it helps her pots drain. “There’s nothing that can kill a plant faster than being waterlogged,” she says.

And though there are a lot of things sprouting, Settles says that, after planting, “I probably don’t spend more than an hour taking care of the garden a week.

“I don’t have to pull weeds, either. We just love to sit out there. It’s so peaceful.”

• THE PATIO FAIRY GARDEN.

Stone pots filled with ferns and boxwoods line the front stoop of Anna Fuhrman and Joe Kerr’s Georgetown home, a verdant hint of what lies inside. There are air plants stashed under glass cloches, wee succulents crowding the pot rack in the kitchen and, beyond expansive French doors, a narrow backyard oasis of hydrangeas, grasses and Japanese maples.

“I wanted it to look like a fairy garden, a place where my daughter, Lucy, and I can play make-believe,” says Fuhrman.

The plants and flowers thriving in the long, rectangular beds and mismatched pots come across like an English garden on steroids. Tall, spiky red pincushion flowers keep company with chartreuse creeping Jenny and butterfly bushes, their purple flowers swarming with bees.

“I make sure there’s color happening all the time,” says Fuhrman. “That often means annuals, and sometimes I just stick a pot of something into the beds — it’s an easy way to fill in space.”

“And sometimes, I just like to drink whiskey in the garden,” says Kerr. “But Anna, she’s all about getting her toes in the dirt out here.”

• THE NEW ORLEANS-STYLE BALCONY GARDEN.

From the balcony of their fourth-floor D.C. apartment, Brad Schou and Barron Womble invite people to stop and stare. “Pedestrians give a thumbs up, and people in their cars sometimes yell up, ‘We love your balcony,'” says Womble.

Thanks to a complex plan of topiaries and plant “walls” facing the street, the couple put on a brilliant show from May through frost. Each spring, they plan out a curtain of ivy, sweet potato vines, wave petunias and other plants that grow to cover their balcony railing.

The balcony display is powered by six Florafelt plant walls — like the shoe bags you hang over closet doors. Their pockets are stuffed with soil, then flowers or vines. Womble accents the design with ball topiaries that might be begonias, petunias or impatiens. “It’s about creating a green environment for us to relax in,” he says. “Passers-by see the garden, and we get privacy.”

Things look leafy inside the balcony, too. Ivy snakes up trellises, and water features gently burble, masking the noise of the traffic below. “We met in New Orleans, and there are so many great balconies there,” says Schou. “This is all inspired by spaces in the French Quarter.”