Displaying miniature plants

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This past weekend I spent doing a "nursery crawl" with some serious plant experts in Tucson, Arizona. The places we visited had the coolest, tiniest, plants that you could imagine. And the "price per pound" for these miniatures was astronomical!

I like miniatures (I mean, look at my dog!). And if you do, too, you know that display is everything. While I was looking around this weekend, I got some great ideas on how to display these plants. But for purposes of this blog post, I thought that it would be best to start with how NOT to display miniatures plants. So here it is:

• Don't display them in little tiny separate pots. Putting them in little pots along the window sill is as tacky as having a shot glass collection. Uh, but your shot glass collection is fine, really.

• Don't put them in some type of "novelty pot". You know the kind I mean, some of them have have little holes along the side. That sort of thing. Elaborate pots are as tacky as elaborate light switch covers. If you must, you must. But, a novelty pot draws attention away from the plants.

• Don't put goofy stuff in the pot. Hopefully you don't have gnomes out in your garden, either. So no plastic birds, or shiny balls. Intead put in small, craggy rocks. Nothing fancy, just simple and nice.

Put a tall plant in the middle, surrounded by shorter plants with rocks in between. I have this pot filled up with ordinary potting soil, and the top layer has some nice volcanic pumice. The plant in the middle is a sansevieria. In the front is an agave, and at left and right are Haworthia.

This is composition. And if you're not comfortable doing this (I was an art major), find someone to help you. Done correctly, these little "tableaus" are beautiful. And they really set off these plants as the tiny jewels that they are!

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