Plants For Late Winter Containers – The weather in mid to late winter is often cold and inhospitable for both gardeners and plants, but if you choose carefully you will find several gems to bring welcome color, even on the dullest days. Snowdrop, spring snowflake, dwarf irises, winter aconite, anemone blonde and the early daffodils in containers will all flower at this time.
Position them in a sheltered spot outside the house and enjoy them as you enter or leave.
Or simply hang them in a basket close to a window so that you can admire and appreciate them from indoors. If you want an instant container, buy two or three pots of cyclamen, transfer them to a little wicker basket or shallow pot with a few trails of ivy and enjoy immediately.
Snowdrops bulbs and the lumpy tubers of winter aconites are sold as small, dry specimens in autumn, and it is a sad fact that, because they are over dried and kept out of the ground for too long, only a small number will produce leaves and flowers. Once established, however, they will flower and multiply well, massing up underground as well as by self seeding.
Snowdrops
Instead of trying to have a container display for new bulbs and tubers bought in fall, buy them as growing plants at flowering time in late winter, pot them into a larger container and keep them in an out of the way corner for the following year, by which time they should be nicely established. Alternatively, if you already know that you have some growing in the garden but would like to try them nearer the house in small pots, dig them up out of the ground in late autumn and plant them immediately into a well drained, soil based compost.
Winter aconite