front yard fountain

With fall fast approaching and the air growing chillier, your spring annuals will soon begin dying off, clearing the way for fall planting. Fortunately, there are lots of fall annuals that thrive in Minnesota. If you want to decorate your house with a beautiful variety of fall colors, one of the best ways to do so is by having a fall planter garden installed in front of your home.

Stylish and convenient, fall planters allow you to improve your home’s curb appeal with a splash of autumnal beauty, without requiring you to spend a lot of time on your hands and knees, digging in the dirt with a trowel. Designing a well-mixed fall planter garden is pretty straightforward: you catch eyes with a thriller, you round your pot out with fillers and then you finish off by rimming your planter with spillers. Keep reading to learn about how to set up thrillers, fillers and spillers in fall planters in Minnesota.

 

Fall Thrillers

A fall thriller should be just as exciting as it sounds; a tall, vibrant centerpiece in your container garden that will immediately steal the attention of anyone walking to your front door. Any tall-growing annual that blooms during fall will work well as a thriller, with rudbeckia (black-eyed susans) and celosia often being good choices. Decorative grasses, particularly those with reddish or purplish coloration, also tend to be a winner for fall planter gardens.

Some of the best fall thrillers in Minnesota are:

  • Black-Eyed Susans
  • Carex Grass ‘Red Rooster’
  • Celosia ‘Kelos Fire Orange’
  • Cordyline ‘Red Star’
  • Purple Fountain Grass

 

Fall Fillers

Once you’ve picked your thriller, you can choose a few different fall fillers to surround it with. Fillers should be shorter and broader than your thriller, and can be used to create a nice variety of colors. There are practically limitless filler choices for your fall planter garden. The most obvious, and most popular, choice tends to be mums, which love the fall weather and grow in a ton of amazing colors. But if you don’t want to go all-mum with your planter, there are tons of other great options like pansies and ornamental kale.

Some good Minnesota-hardy fall fillers include:

  • Angelonia ‘Archangel Dark Rose’
  • Aster ‘Blue Dragon’
  • Golden Sage
  • Helichrysum ‘Icicles’
  • Mums
  • Ornamental Kale
  • Pansies
  • Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’
  • Swiss Chard

 

Fall Spillers

The final step in designing your fall container garden is to rim it with some spillers that drape down over the rim of the planter. Spillers allow you to get the most out of your fall planter, since they grow down the sides instead of growing up and competing with your fillers for space. Spillers also cover the stems of other plants and the soil beneath to create a great aesthetic. Many varieties of sedum make for good fall spillers and, while they don’t actually spill down the sides of a container, ornamental cabbages fill a similar niche as low-growing plants.

If you’re looking for some fun spillers for Minnesota fall planters, start with:

  • Creeping Jenny ‘Goldilocks’
  • Diascia ‘Darla Orange’
  • Ornamental Cabbages
  • Sedum ‘Angelina’
  • Sweet Alyssum

 

Have a Fall Planter Designed For You

If you don’t have the time in your hectic schedule to design and plant a fall container garden, don’t despair; there are talented professionals who would be happy to do it for you! Connect with Ground One today to have a custom fall planter garden designed and installed on your property in the greater Twin Cities area.