Thriller, filler, spiller - the art of planting landscape barrels

One thing I was not trained on in college was how to design. Partially because I wasn't interested in learning, but also I was more interested in the production side of things. Well, after 6 months of working in a production greenhouse, I realized I get way too bored. So really, I shot myself in the foot on that one.

At work, I decided to add landscape barrels to a few high traffic locations to bring color to an area that doesn't have much going on. Except... I really wasn't sure how to design a planter. I did some research and I found the phrase "thriller, filler, spiller." That's a pretty easy way to start a planter design! This was my third summer filling these barrels and I'm getting better each time, but I'm still not satisfied with my summer design.

This is what the design looked like the day I planted it. I wish I took another picture of what it looked like after a few months. It really filled out and the sweet potato vine really spilled over the sides. This design has a King Cyprus as a thriller and calibrachoa as a filler.

I wanted to go with the purples and greens as the main colors. I also accented in white, which you can see with the nicotiana. One thing I want to try this summer is clumping instead of evenly spacing out each plant. Mostly because the sweet potato vine chokes everything out when its spread out like that.

Here's a close up of the plants I used last year. There's also some coleus in there for some other texture. I will remember to take some beginning, middle, and end pictures to really show how the plants progress after they are established.

This year I decided to do a winter barrel design. I had never done one before, so I did some research to help me pick out some plant material. I used spruce toppers, pine boughs, red twigged dogwood, winterberries, pine cones, and coned cedar.

Here's a far away shot of both winter barrels. Sort of hard to see the specifics of the design, so I got a little closer.

I really liked how these turned out for my first attempt. I know next year I would like to spread out the winterberry a bit more. You can see that I had a few too many clumped together in the front here. After the picture was taken, I did fix the orientation of the sugar cones (the really big pine cones) so they were more centered. I highly recommend trying this to spruce up a planter in winter.

I did learn that you need to break up the soil deeper than you think. You want to firmly stick each plant into the soil so they stay standing up during the entire season. I didn't bring a big enough shovel to break up the soil so I did have some trouble getting the stems in firmly enough. 

Other than that, I really liked how these looked this year! Add a little snow to the boughs and BOOM, you have a straight-up-pinterest-landscape.

Looking forward to spring to plant the barrels again and see how I can keep improving the look!