The Flower Yard
Growing Flamboyant Flowers in Containers
Arthur Parkinson · Kyle Books, 2021
A dense, high-impact flower garden grown entirely in pots on a narrow brick path. The best answer on this shelf to "I have no soil".
What's actually in it
- Runs seasonally through a year of container planting — crocus and tulips in spring, through sweet peas, cosmos, sunflowers and irises, to dahlias in late summer and amaryllis for winter.
- Practical container technique — pot sizing, compost, drainage, staking, feeding, watering and pest management in pots.
- Styling — treating pots as living vases of growing flower arrangements, and planting asymmetrically rather than symmetrically.
- Colour philosophy — his "Venetian tones", and an explicit, unapologetic rejection of white flowers and pastels.
- His planning method: cutting up nursery catalogues to physically test colour combinations before ordering.
- Cutting for the house, and cutting to drive further flowering.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- He bans white flowers outright and says pastels irritate him. Whatever you think of that, it is a real position, argued rather than asserted, and it is why the results look like nobody else's.
- On pot size: big is essential, for scale and for ease of care. Large pots hold more water and root volume, so they need less nursing — the single most useful thing in the book for anyone growing on a balcony.
- He plans each year by physically cutting up nursery catalogues and arranging the cuttings to test colour combinations before ordering anything.
- Named cultivars and a specific placement rule: Eremurus 'Cleopatra'; Cosmos 'Rubenza' as a companion for dahlias; dahlia 'Tangerine Schippers'. The tallest dahlias go at the edge of a group rather than the middle, so nothing looks arranged.
Buy it if
You have a yard, a balcony or a path and no ground at all, and you want it to be spectacular rather than tidy.
Don't buy it if
Anyone with beds and borders to plant, and anyone who wants low maintenance or low cost.
Where it falls short
Two things the book's charm rather glosses over. First, the practical content is real but unevenly distributed — the technique is embedded in narrative and opinion rather than laid out systematically, and the early sections are more manifesto than method. Several readers find it more inspirational than instructional. Second, the approach is expensive and labour-intensive: the palette is overwhelmingly bulbs and annuals, meaning constant watering, feeding, staking and deadheading, and buying new stock every year. Nothing on peat-free compost performance in containers, which is now the central practical problem in UK container growing.
Who wrote it
Parkinson trained at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, then worked for Sarah Raven as both florist and teaching associate, and created the garden at the Emma Bridgewater factory. He writes for The Times and The Telegraph and co-hosts a podcast with Raven. At the time of this book he gardened the narrow front path of a Nottingham terrace, filled with large tubs — he calls it an "archipelago of pots". Two things to weigh: he trained under and still works alongside Sarah Raven, and his variety recommendations overlap heavily with her catalogue. And his credentials are horticultural and design-led rather than scientific — this is a book about spectacle, and should be judged as one.
Where it was written
Nottingham. The whole method depends on a mild maritime winter — bulbs left in pots outdoors would not survive a continental freeze-thaw cycle.
The facts
- AuthorArthur Parkinson
- PublisherKyle Books
- Published2021
- FormatHardback, 208 pages
- ISBN-13
9780857839176 - LevelBeginner to improver
Checked against publisher listings, UK retailers and library records in August 2026. If any of this is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
Where to get it
Buying secondhand? Match the ISBN above — several books on this shelf have editions that look identical but aren't.