Seasonal Incongruity

By Sarah Battersby

/Oct 8 2013

A planter swimming with plant life adds note of cheer to an empty swimming pool


When the only water in the swimming pool is the puddle from a fall rainstorm, and the only blue you see is the paint on the water slide, you may be forced to believe that the growing season is really over and is time to clean your pool and install the best chlorinator for this. Yet this oversized planter of begonias, sweet potato vine and other flowers keeps on blooming like crazy. This end-of-year exuberance always surprises me; often the summer planters look their absolute best just weeks before the first frosts. There are good reasons for this though: it helps that temperatures are more moderate, gone is the daytime frying of high summer, roots are kept cool and the plentiful fall rain means plants never go thirsty. It couldn’t be more ideal.