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They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and this goes for your home too. But it’s not your front door alone that needs to do the work of wowing your guests as they step up to your threshold. Today we’re thinking about plants for your front door entrance along with the greenery and flowers you can add to them to make the welcome you offer as warm and inviting as possible. It’s time to improve your front door feng shui with some of the best front door plants on the market. Let’s accessorize!
Which Plants Should I Choose?
Plants for front door planters will often need to be fairly hardy and happy to grow in shaded areas, so we’ll start off looking at front door plants for shade. Our first stop is the Busy Lizzy: a perfect choice for a shaded area with beautiful flowers that last well into autumn when looked after. Ivy is a great hardy plant that brings body and colour to a pot and is happy to grow pretty much anywhere. A pot will keep this voracious grower contained so there’s no risk of it climbing up your walls and taking over your home!
For a splash of colour, you’ll need to think about front door flower plants that take well to container living. Coreopsis is a wonderful option for bright yellow flowers, and if you’re after a real country cottage look, combine this with elegant daisy-like Cosmos. Red impatiens will really catch the eye while Hydrangeas will add voluptuous pastel blooms to a larger container, and violas will punctuate any display with bold dots and splashes.
While spring and summer are certainly the best seasons for flowers, your front door plants need not be confined to these months alone. Chrysanthemums are great front door plants for autumn and can be beautifully combined with late-season crops such as pumpkins and gourds. Ornamental kale complements an autumn display well, and Viburnum will bring you beautiful orange berries.
And what about a front door plant for winter? Well, Heather is always a good winter front door plant idea for the UK as it’s emblematic, colourful and tough as old boots, while Skimmia Japonica will produce small red buds through the winter, which burst into pink flowers in the spring.
Using plants of varying height and body will create beautiful contrasting structures in your front door feature plant displays. Add height by incorporating grasses such as Blue Oat Grass and Miscanthus, or a variety of ferns, which will provide depth and body as well. You could choose a climbing plant for your front door such as Ivy or Clematis, or even use front door trees in pots for an elegant statement. Contrast this height with plants that appear to fall out of your planter and tumble towards the ground like Petunias or Baby’s Breath.
And for the more practical gardener, why not use a series of smaller pots to create a small kitchen garden of herbs? As well as producing a lovely display of fragrances and foliage, this can be a great idea for smaller households and those without gardens or much outside space.
Whilst we’ve tried to make sure all of the front door plants ideas above are low maintenance if you really cannot stand the idea of getting your fingers dirty and keeping on top of the watering, you might want to consider artificial front door plants. Front door fake plants (or faux plants) are easily available from garden centres and DIY shops and could give you the look you’re after without stealing any of your valuable time!
What Should I Plant them in?
Take your cue for your front door plant pots from the construction of your home and its surroundings. If you live in an older building, traditional round terracotta pots will help to give you a soft cottage garden feel, while a modern building may well suit a galvanised steel planter with a stronger, more angled design. If you want to really emphasise the plants, choose front door plant containers in a colour similar to that of your building so they blend in a little.
Whatever the style of your home, there are plenty of containers, pots, and front door planter boxes available to choose from. Tall bronze pots can look fantastic with bright spring flowers sprouting from the top and a pair of large square metal planters look elegant either side of a front door when planted with small trees. You can use specially designed frame-pots for climbers and concrete pots look surprisingly beautiful with soft green foliage spilling over the top of them.
Don’t just limit yourself to traditional front door plant pot ideas when you’re choosing containers, think about other objects you could include in your arrangements. Old chairs, fruit baskets, wellington boots, old buckets or milk containers, watering cans, even bicycle frames can all be up-cycled into planters or objects to place planters around, to add a touch of the unique and quirky to your arrangement.
Think too about how you arrange the containers themselves. A large pot containing a series of smaller pots can create a lovely cascading tower effect, whilst attaching a series of pots to an old plank leant vertically in your porch can look rustic and charming (whilst saving you valuable floor space!) You might include a front door plant stand in your design to bring plants closer to eye level, or find some matching pots to create to a symmetrical look. If symmetry is a little too harsh, a range of different pots containing similar flowers to tie the look together gives a softer, more organic effect.
And for a truly unique look, why not paint, or even make your own planters?
Tips and Tricks for Creating Fabulous Planters
We’ll finish off today’s article with some of our top tips and tricks for a truly beautiful (and easy to maintain!) front door planter design.
- Make sure you use the right type of soil for the plants you have chosen – start by finding out what soil the place you get them from use
- For a front door plant design that works from a distance, put larger plants towards the back of the display to make room for smaller ones at the front
- Use a larger pot for less frequent watering
- Front door plant displays will always look better if you incorporate a range of different heights, textures and colours in them
- Be sure to feed flowering and fruit producing plants in your front door plant décor with fertiliser to give them the energy they need for their displays
Whether you’re making front door planters in spring, summer, fall or winter, there’s a whole heap of choice out there for front door plant décor ideas, and we hope we’ve given you plenty of food for thought for your own front door planter ideas. There’s nothing lovelier than a warm welcome, so why not let nature give you a helping hand and make your front door look warm and inviting, even on the coldest winter’s day?
