If you are looking for an easy-care mini garden the best plants to choose are succulents. They come in all sorts of interesting shapes and since they require little water are low maintenance and easy to care for. You can grow succulents indoors or outside and mix and max them to create many awesome designs as Laren Dunec Hoang explains in her article which I found on the Houzz website.
Succulents are wildly popular with beginning gardeners and seasoned horticulturalists for good reason. They come in a dazzling diversity of forms, colors and varieties and don?t need to be fussed over with frequent watering. Potted up as patio accents or living centerpieces, succulents in containers can enhance your living spaces inside and out. Here are 10 ideas to help get you started.1. Green centerpiece. Lasting much longer than cut flowers, succulents planted as a green centerpiece can add interest to a room for years. Choose a shallow container and plant with a variety of small-scale succulents like echeveria, sedum and hens-and-chicks (Sempervivum spp.). Cluster your containers for greater impact.While it?s never recommended to plant in a container without a drainage hole for outdoor use, you can get away with it for low-water indoor container displays of succulents. Just remember, you?ll need to be diligent about watering frequently but lightly, never allowing the soil to get soggy. To set your plants up to thrive, position your finished centerpiece in an area of the room that receives bright, indirect light.2. Mini landscape. Create a miniature living garden scene in a shallow container by planting a variety of succulents with different forms. Play around with mimicking a landscape scene as literally or loosely as you like by including a tall, upright succulent ? like kalanchoe or fan aloe (Aloe plicatilis) ? to represent a tree form, and adding clumps of sedum and rosette-forming echeveria to mimic blooms or shrubs in the design. Cover the soil with dark gravel or blue-green crushed glass to unify the scene.3. Container top-dressing. Containers planted with small trees or shrubs the standard way can leave a bare patch of exposed soil at the tree?s base. Planting this area with succulents both covers the soil with an attractive, unexpected top-dressing and helps cut down on water loss through evaporation. Low-growing succulents like echeveria, hens-and-chicks, senecio and sedum all work well.
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Feature photo: Lauren Dunec Design
Rachel Brilhart
Molly Adair Radford