Disability Doesn’t Stop This Nature Lover from Creating Beautiful Patio and Balcony Garden Sanctuaries
GardensAll community member, Lesley Cole, shares her beautiful photos and tips of flowers for balconies. What’s all the more remarkable about Lesley’s balcony garden is that she’s disabled and yet creates is all, with limited mobility from a wheelchair!
Creating green spaces with flowers and plants will do more than beautify your and outdoor and indoor living spaces. Growing things into beautiful arrangements and companions, is wonderful therapy. Gardening and plants are proven to reduce stress and anxiety and bring more life and oxygen wherever they grow.
Lesley’s words are captured throughout this article in italics.
GARDENER, LESLEY COLE’S MOTTO:
“To build a spot of Paradise everywhere I go.“
And indeed she has!
A One Pot Balcony Garden
At one point, as Lesley’s disability required her to move into subsidized housing, the apartment complex only allowed ONE potted plant!!
Lesley called that “soul crushing”, but, in here typical creative — and determined — survivor mode, she found a way to make the most out of even that stern limitation.
Instead, Lesley got the largest pot that would fit on her tiny 10 foot patio. She planted clematis and fit a trellis under the balcony above her with matching lavender rose, coral bell, Columbia, and alternating perennials. Later she added a lily.
It’s surprising what can be grown from just one large flower pot with a little creativity and ingenuity!
Flowering Vine Plants Create a Beautiful Privacy Screen for Balconies and Patio Gardens
Growing a beautiful living, flowering privacy fence from just one large pot!!
Chocolate Fuchsia, Yellow Calla Lily & Chartreuse Hosta
I loved experiments with chocolate fuchsia, yellow calla, and chartreuse hosta!
FLOWERS FOR BALCONIES
Love Lies Bleeding – Amaranthus caudatus – An Edible Beauty
These amaranth flowers add graceful fuschia beauty to a balcony garden. But more than that, all amaranth plants are edible, so you can have your beauty and eat it too!
Although the flowers produce MANY seeds, (over 100,000 per plant), you would need a field of them to have enough to harvest for use in cooking as a grain. However the leaves added to salads are an easy win for this lovely balcony plant, including for fall salad greens.[1]https://www.tropicalpermaculture.com/amaranth-plant.html
Amaranth is a high protein seed used like a grain, with beautiful edible flowers, leaves and even the stems and shoots. Just leave the majority of leaves intact to continue nurturing the plant.[2]https://www.tropicalpermaculture.com/amaranth-plant.html[3]https://pallensmith.com/2016/10/07/5-things-you-didnt-know-amaranth/
Amaranth are beautiful flowers for balconies and every part of the amaranth plant is edible. Enjoy the leaves as you would spinach.
~GardensAll.com
Daylily Flowers for Balconies
I love to buy pansy or viola to flesh out the lily pots with color and blooms while the lily trees grow.
The daylily pot stays full with its own grassy mound. I often plant a daylily that dies back in winter with a daylily that’s green all year. That way the pot has a green top on it through winter.
Yellow Umbrella of Turban Lily
“My all time favorite was the wonderful yellow Umbrella of Turban Lily.”