Seeds in the City

If you live in the city, you might have a fire escape, balcony or back patio abutting an alley instead of a yard. Your landscape is iron, wood, brick, concrete. It's an unlikely place for nature, which makes it an ideal place for an urban garden. An urban container garden, that is.

Anything grown or planted in the ground can be grown or planted in a container, and generally with more ease. In containers, you control the quality of the soil. You minimize the chances of wrangling with weeds. You can relocate pots for aesthetic or growing purposes (such as moving inside during winter). And most important for the amateur urban gardener, you can start small and work your way up.

Now is the time to start planning. The area probably experienced its last frost in the past week, though some say Mother's Day is the safest point to start growing outdoors. The coming weekend brings the Garden Fair at the National Arboretum, where you can buy a wide selection of plants (both usual and unusual) and get advice from master gardeners (details at http://www.fona.org). Don't wait till July, when the heat will be too much for plants to establish themselves. Take a look around your living space, inside and outside. Find that spot of utter urban banality and get ready to conjure some horticultural beauty on it. Then ask yourself five basic questions and get going. Read on for all you need to know, plus diagrams of tailor-made containers for four kinds of plants: evening, edible, showy in the shade and tough to kill.