The trick to keeping your terracotta pots looking their best all year round is to maintain the plants regularly. You might like to do this by using seasonal plants and replacing them, which has the advantage of an ever-changing display. If you have found the perfect long term partners for your pot, though, you will need to do a little maintenance to keep them healthy.
Plants in pots can run out of space for their roots, and new growth can strangle the old roots as they jostle for the same nutrients. Just pruning the plant above the ground does not address this, and eventually the plant will become ‘pot bound’ and sickly. The roots will travel into the crock at the bottom of the pot and find their way into the drainage hole at the bottom, potentially blocking it and causing waterlogging. To stop this happening, you should remove the plant from the pot and prune the roots regularly. If you are a novice gardener, this can seem counter-intuitive and a little scary – digging a plant up might not seem like the best way to look after it. Root pruning, though, not only reduces the roots to a manageable level for the space available but also stimulates above-ground growth.
If this all sounds a bit drastic, then don’t worry – root pruning has been going on for centuries and is a tried and tested technique. In medieval times, smallholders would separate their plots with low parterre hedges and periodically chop all the inner roots off with the edge of a spade as they threatened to encroach on the growing area.
To prune, remove the plant from the pot and loosen the dirt with a garden fork or trowel. Then, depending on how thick and woody the roots are, use secateurs, loppers, shears or even a pruning saw to remove straggly overgrowth. If you are new to root pruning, our advice would be to do it incrementally – start off by removing 25 or 30 per cent the first year, then a little more the second year until you find the right level. Your plants will thank you for it, and your pots will look stunning all year round.
To prune, remove the plant from the pot and loosen the dirt with a garden fork or trowel. Then, depending on how thick and woody the roots are, use secateurs, loppers, shears or even a pruning saw to remove straggly overgrowth. If you are new to root pruning, our advice would be to do it incrementally – start off by removing 25 or 30 per cent the first year, then a little more the second year until you find the right level. Your plants will thank you for it, and your pots will look stunning all year round.
If you’d like to learn more about root pruning, Italian Terrace designer and director Louise Drayton is hosting an event for the Garden Museum on 25 June 2020 and will be demonstrating how to get the most out of your plants and pots. Visit the Garden Museum website for more details.