5 Questions to Get Your Green Thumbs Going

Before you launch into creating an urban garden, here are five questions to ask. We've thrown in the answers at no extra charge.

Where Do I Start?

Proper gardening involves time and money, so suss out your motives. Do you want to grow for show, or to feed yourself, or to attract certain birds and insects? Do you want to grow from seed (more work-intensive but cheaper) or buy ready-made plants and flowers (easier but costly)?

Ambition is one thing, and space is another. You can vow to re-create the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but that doesn't mean you should try it on your six-square-foot back patio that gets zero direct sunlight. Observe how much sun your potential garden space gets, and plant accordingly.

Also, don't try to mix full-sun and shade plants in the same garden; that kind of high-wire chlorophyll juggling is best left to the experts.

Start with containers that are at least 10 to 12 inches in diameter. If you're putting containers on a wooden deck or balcony, make sure the structure can hold the weight. (Big pots, filled with soil and watered regularly, can be very heavy.) And think vertically: With limited space, the solution to gardening grandly is to invest in climbers.

"Pole beans grow vertically. Do them on a chain-link fence or up the fire escape, and keep plucking them and eating them the whole summer," says Matthew Roberts, manager of Ginkgo Gardens on Capitol Hill.

"Sunflowers are surprisingly easy. You're going to want to get the dwarf kind. They grow up four to five feet. A row of five of those only takes up about three feet in length and a foot and a half deep, and they just rock."

How Do I Make It Pop?

An amateur container gardener must consider three things before planting: form, texture and color. A good container garden has vegetation of varying heights (taller plants in the middle or in back, surrounded by shorter plants and bordered by drooping, viny plants) as well as flowers that provide a constant or staggered show of blooming. Apart from height, make sure you have a variety of shapes and textures.

"Look to use different leaves," says John Peter Thompson, chairman of Maryland's Behnke Nurseries. "Pointy sword-type leaves that grass or gladiolas would give you, fuzzy and round leaves and leaves that are indented or serrated. Looking at texture, some leaves are hard and shiny, some soft and fuzzy. Planting a perennial like lamb's ear gives you something to touch."

The most important and striking variable, though, is color. Hot colors such as red, yellow and orange seem closer to the eye than cool shades. So if you want to make a small urban space seem bigger, plant blue or purple flowers, whose colors make them appear to recede.

Also give equal consideration to the hue of the leaves. "Remember: Your colors include green," Thompson says. "There are green-blues, green-yellows and green-reds, and thinking in terms of sticking to all one kind or contrasting different greens" is as important to the garden's color palette as the other parts of the rainbow.

How Much Time Will It Take?

Container gardens require monitoring, but not too much monitoring.