....I think this is "Creative". Just boot it elsewhere if I goofed.
I work at a garden center, and I figured I ought to put my employee discount to use and plant some flowers, but I didn't have any strong opinions on what to plant, so I first decided to do a pot based on my home flight, Fire. I posted it in Fire's forums, but then today I went ahead and splurged on a second one based on Light, so here we are in all-flight land!
It's traditional for container gardens to have something tall, something trailing, and some stuff in the middle - which also worked as a visual formula for a volcano, or a flame flickering over a bed of coals.
The tall stuff in the middle is orange snapdragon (ha ha visual pun), and the shorter, leggier orange flowers are calibrachoa, which has a "trailing" habit that is more of a "buddy I do what I want and you can't stop me" habit. Seemed appropriate! The tendency for some stems to go up also helped the orange flowers look like leaping sparks. Under all that is the low, mounding oxalis, which is a fancy name for clover and its relatives. I wanted the non-flowering plants to all have dark foliage, which evokes black, charred land, or coal, or soot, or iron. The oxalis also has a very fine texture that reminded me of a bed of coals, and it's supposed to spread out a little under the calibrachoa. Finally, the black sweet potato vine, which kind of looks like the item cindervine:
(...kind of, that's definitely an ivy leaf but oh whatever), and hopefully evokes this other thing to continue the "volcano" image:
...And that's the Fire planter! Today, I took a stab at Light. I tried some experimental stuff and I'm not sure how much of a success it was. The original plan was to load it up with yellow stuff, but then I stopped and thought about the whole ruins thing. I decided to go for a low profile, trying to evoke moss and vines growing over white stone.
Trailing vines are vinca, the succulent with bright yellow flowers is ice plant, the white flowers are euphorbia and the grass is sedge. I think I need to put down more soil cover to make it uniformly white, and the ice plant definitely needs to fill out - it lost a few flowers in the planting process. I kind of regret not using something yellower in place of the euphorbia, but hopefully the ice plant will make up for it.
There's a handful of bigger stones embedded in the soil too which are supposed to represent the fallen pillars and stuff.
I'd like to do others - I already have ideas for Plague (impatiens look so grody and toothy if you leave them be for a few days, and begonias look really fleshy), Nature (we got canna lilies in!), and Lightning (succulents.), but my wallet is crying out in pain even after the discount and I need to give it some time to recuperate. I'll see what I can swing once I've saved up again.
I work at a garden center, and I figured I ought to put my employee discount to use and plant some flowers, but I didn't have any strong opinions on what to plant, so I first decided to do a pot based on my home flight, Fire. I posted it in Fire's forums, but then today I went ahead and splurged on a second one based on Light, so here we are in all-flight land!
It's traditional for container gardens to have something tall, something trailing, and some stuff in the middle - which also worked as a visual formula for a volcano, or a flame flickering over a bed of coals.
The tall stuff in the middle is orange snapdragon (ha ha visual pun), and the shorter, leggier orange flowers are calibrachoa, which has a "trailing" habit that is more of a "buddy I do what I want and you can't stop me" habit. Seemed appropriate! The tendency for some stems to go up also helped the orange flowers look like leaping sparks. Under all that is the low, mounding oxalis, which is a fancy name for clover and its relatives. I wanted the non-flowering plants to all have dark foliage, which evokes black, charred land, or coal, or soot, or iron. The oxalis also has a very fine texture that reminded me of a bed of coals, and it's supposed to spread out a little under the calibrachoa. Finally, the black sweet potato vine, which kind of looks like the item cindervine:
(...kind of, that's definitely an ivy leaf but oh whatever), and hopefully evokes this other thing to continue the "volcano" image:
...And that's the Fire planter! Today, I took a stab at Light. I tried some experimental stuff and I'm not sure how much of a success it was. The original plan was to load it up with yellow stuff, but then I stopped and thought about the whole ruins thing. I decided to go for a low profile, trying to evoke moss and vines growing over white stone.
Trailing vines are vinca, the succulent with bright yellow flowers is ice plant, the white flowers are euphorbia and the grass is sedge. I think I need to put down more soil cover to make it uniformly white, and the ice plant definitely needs to fill out - it lost a few flowers in the planting process. I kind of regret not using something yellower in place of the euphorbia, but hopefully the ice plant will make up for it.
There's a handful of bigger stones embedded in the soil too which are supposed to represent the fallen pillars and stuff.
I'd like to do others - I already have ideas for Plague (impatiens look so grody and toothy if you leave them be for a few days, and begonias look really fleshy), Nature (we got canna lilies in!), and Lightning (succulents.), but my wallet is crying out in pain even after the discount and I need to give it some time to recuperate. I'll see what I can swing once I've saved up again.