We change the plants in the wooden box planters we have at the bottom of our driveway to give the warmest welcome possible to visitors and to cheer up the entrance to the garden. We recently took out the summer display and changed it into a display more suited for the late autumn and to last through the winter. We often buy young plants to go in these boxes and this gives us a chance to grow them on before moving them into final planting places in the garden proper and it also gives us an opportunity to see how unknown plants perform.

We began by collecting together all the new plants, bags of bulbs, chicken manure pellets, multi-purpose compost and trowels. The summer plantings definitely looked in need of refreshing!

We had collected together some young evergreen shrubs, some deep red cyclamen and variegated ivies together with some richly coloured Uncinia rubra grasses.

First job was to plant up the terra-cotta pots in the wrought iron plant stand with purple and yellow violas and some of our seedlings of our bronze evergreen grasses.

I cleared out the summer plants, removed the top 3 inches of compost and refreshed it with chicken manure pellets as fertiliser and fresh compost. While I did this Jude the Undergardener trimmed back the flowering stems on our hedge of Munstead Lavenders along the road edge and planted a mixture of bulbs in the narrow drive-side border.

Once refreshed and ready for planting we got going on the best part of the job, the planting up of the boxes.

The plants were soon snuggled up to their new partners and the planters looked the part again. The plants removed earlier were loaded into the wheelbarrow ready to be planted out in the garden borders.

Ah! Now that looks better! That should cheer the garden entrance up for the winter very nicely.