Hang Your Plants With These Porch Planter Ideas
Your front porch is not just a piece of your property. It’s an opening statement that lets your family, friends, and other guests know what to expect when they enter your home. If you like to festoon this special hunk of property with planters, there are several terrific ways you can do so to make the kind of statement you wish to make. Here’s a look at some of the best ones.
1. Modern Urns
If you have a newer home, or if you have an older home that’s loaded with sleek modern day décor, a set of contemporary urns filled with foliage may be right up your alley. At best, they can act like an extension of the decorative motif you have within your abode. At the very least, they could fit in quite comfortably with the aesthetic of your home’s exterior.
Typically, these planters won’t have intricate patterns or designs on them like you may see on a vase. Rather, they tend to be smooth with either a solid color or an artistic gradient, and may have a reflective property. They’ll certainly reflect that you have good taste, especially if you have a meticulously arranged, colorful plant arrangement coming from its top.
2. Planters as Holiday and Seasonal Décor
Front porch planters are prime real estate for creative types to flex their holiday or seasonal decorative muscles. The obvious time of year to use your planters to signal the season is around Christmas, as the above video demonstrates. However, if you’re not afraid to think outside the box, you can use them to mark the calendar all year-round.
What’s more, doing so isn’t rocket science. For instance, bright pastel decorations mixed with bright springtime flowers are perfect ways to signal in the Easter season. On the other side of things, adding a small pumpkin or wheat stalks to your planter will add a perfect touch of harvest to the front of your home.
3. A Row of Greenery
If you’re a serious gardener, there’s probably a part of you that would prefer to make the focus of your planters the actual plants shooting out from their tops. If this is the case, securing several vases and filling them with green plants may be the best option for you.
While a row of shrubs or similar greens won’t have the bursts of color like floral-forward décor would, they do feature a stripped-down elegance that tends to work in a versatile number of settings. What’s more, this motif works just as well in a sleek, modern planter as it does in a rustic or ornate pot or vase.
4. Put Your Guardrail to Use
If you have a guardrail or fence that buffers your front porch from your front lawn, why let your porch have all the floral fun? There are a host of cool, colorful ways to infuse eye-catching plant goodness onto that mundane barrier. They tend to be effective because they push your home’s overall aesthetic further outward even beyond the front door.
Of course, having a hanging planter on your guardrail doesn’t mean that you have to abandon the concept of putting planters by your front porch. If you do this, you’ll want to make sure that there is a decorative through-line that connects the guardrail planter with your porch planter. A funky juxtaposition would end up detracting rather than enhancing.
5. Stacked Planters
You don’t necessarily need a large planter on your porch to create a proper plant-driven aesthetic – small plants in small planters will do just fine. However, there is one caveat to this: The object that these little plants rest upon should convey a decorative element that you want to send out to the masses.
If you want to put forth a rustic, country-fried motif, then a flipped-over half-barrel or an old washing bucket will do the trick quite nicely. If modern affects are more your speed, you can utilize a metallic or uniformly colored square to create the right mood.
6. The Classic Urn
With all of the eclectic ways you can bring decorative goodness to your front porch, it may be a little easy to forget the alluring power of a classically ornate urn. Their Romanesque design is so timeless, it transcends any aesthetic boundaries that may still handcuff other porch planters.
Even though their general construct is basically the same, they do carry some. Different colors or additional patterns or décor added to the urn’s body or base may deliver that extra pop of aesthetic goodness that can transform them from being merely beautiful planters to perfect pieces for your overall home aesthetic.
7. A Long Box Planter
Most porch planters feature concentrated bursts of plants to capture the attention of guests. A long box planter running the length of your porch or at the front of your guardrail takes this concentration and stretches it out. It’s a concept that comes complete with plenty of advantages.
Firstly, the length of the box will provide you a broader base to plant a wider range of foliage. This could be a particular boon if you plan on using your planter as part of a seasonal or decorative scheme, as you’ll have more room to place various calendar-driven affects.
Secondly, the extra space that a long box provides doesn’t necessarily have to correlate to a need to plant more flowers or greenery. Some long boxes are designed with the planter areas relegated to its edges with a solid surface in the middle. This allows the plants to be bookends for other design motifs – something that could further drive your own creative expression.
And at the end of the day, creative expression is the very force that drives front porch planters in the first place. The fact that gardening is involved in bringing about this special form of expression is a bonus.
Photo Credit
Photo by Paulding County Area Foundation licensed under CC0
Photo by Paulding County Area Foundation licensed under CC0
Photo by Paulding County Area Foundation licensed under CC0
