Ideas for Autumn Hanging Baskets

Fall hanging baskets bring color and visual interest to your outdoor landscape and help to extend your gardens growing season. Whether you use wire baskets lined with cocoa fiber, ceramic planters or plastic pots, an autumn hanging basket should be filled with quality compost, watered well and be constructed with plants that lend visual symmetry and a color coordination that incorporates the rich hues of fall.

Fill your hanging basket with single or multiple annuals in traditional fall colors. Calibrachoa or superbells look like miniature petunias and are available in a wide array of colors to coordinate with your outdoor landscaping. Combine hardy pansies in upright and trailing varieties along with winter-flowering heathers and small-leaved ivies for an eye-catching focal point on your patio.

Fall-blooming perennials provide a pop of color in your outdoor landscape. Choose aster novi-belgii, or Michaelmas daisy, which blooms from late August until frost and is pleasing in combination with the fluffy, gold, daisy-like blossoms of helianthus, or perennial sunflower. Blooming from late fall to early winter, Mexican marigold mint (Tagetes lucida) features small, marigold-like flowers and grows well in full sun. A great filler for fall hanging baskets, tickseed coreopsis bears small, eight-petaled flowers with darker gold centers and coordinate well if purple and blue flowers.

A hanging basket full of a single ivy variety, or simply edging the container with ivy, is a fresh and simple way to add plants to your outdoor space. The smaller leaved variety such as Anita (hedera helix) has deep-lobed leaves in a medium green shade. Lady Frances (hedera helix) is an attractive yet sturdy type of variegated ivy in a white gray and green color combination that can display splashes of red or pink in cooler weather

Filling your outdoor hanging twith edible plants is a practical way to extend your gardening season. Scarlet funner beans produce beautiful, scarlet flowers on long vines which attract hummingbirds and butterflies. The pods hold dark red beans that can be cooked as a side dish for a family meal. Purple ruffles basil provides visual interest with its frilly and edible purple leaves; it may be planted with rosemary, thyme or basil to aid in seasoning Italian dishes.

Flower bulbs planted in the center of a fall hanging basket are an optimal way to get a head start on your early spring garden. White, yellow and purple crocuses, daffodils and snowdrops lend great color when planted as single specimens and in combination with other evergreen plantings to fill out the basket until the bulbs bloom.