Color Combinations

• Porches and decks are often ideal locations for a series of potted plants. Potted plants and flowers can also help bridge the gap between outdoors and indoors, making the outdoor space feel like an extension of the home. Help complement the interior furnishings by choosing plants that echo the colors and textures used in both the interior and exterior of the home. A sunny yellow kitchen leading to a large porch on a white farmhouse provides the perfect color scheme for potted plants. Choose containers of flowers with bright yellow blossoms such as yellow flag iris (Iris pseudacorus) with soft white blooms such as white petunias (Petunia x hybrida). Combining flower colors with those used throughout the home helps the container garden feel like a living piece of architecture.
  
  

Interesting Shapes

• The gardening experts at Good Housekeeping suggest creating visual interest by filling low, round containers with plants and flowers featuring interesting and unexpected shapes. Fill shallow round containers with succulents and cacti that flower once per year. For a softer look, try using begonias, or begonia cultivators. Plants like the starleaf , wax begonia and the rex begonia feature lacy, scalloped, colored leaves and flowers in various colors including including white, pink and red. Latana is another plant ideal for a container garden full of shapes. This annual flower features small blooms in bright pinks, oranges, reds and yellows and is available in both upright and weeping varieties.
  
  

Privacy Screening

• Small, low-growing flowers are not the only plants well suited to a container garden. Create a privacy screen with container-hardy flowering shrubs and small trees. The Brooklyn Botanical Garden suggests spring flowering shrubs such as the Oregon grape, Mahonia aquifolium and Spirea, or Spiraea thunbergii. Oregon grape shrubs flower with pretty yellow blooms in the spring, while spirea blossoms with white flowers. Some small fruit trees, like apricot, Prunus armeniaca, fill the spring garden with color. Apricot trees bloom in April and May with pink flowers, followed by edible fruit in the summer.
  
  

Three Plant Pot

• One of the best ways to create an interesting, beautiful container garden is to combine multiple flowers into one pot. Expert gardener, Steve Silk, of "Fine Garden Magazine" uses a three-plant process he has dubbed "thrillers, fillers and spillers." This container gardening principle works by choosing one showy, spectacular plant to be the thriller and surrounding it with smaller, unobtrusive plants known as fillers. Finish the look off with a perimeter of weeping plants that spill over the sides of the container. For example, surround a thriller plant like purple fountain grass, Pennisetum setaceum or rubrum, with a flowering filler such as fairy fan flower, Scaevola aemula or blue wonder and finish off the look with a blooming spiller such as bacopas, Sutera spp.