Renaissance
Though medicinal and edible plants were favored in the gardens of the Middle Ages, they were also ornamented with pot plants. Exotics were frequently planted in containers to make them “objects of beauty,” and gardeners practiced “the curious custom of placing pots and growing flowers on beds already planted with flowers,” particularly carnations, which were favorites.
During the Renaissance in Italy and later in France, England, and elsewhere, pot plants became common garden features. In Spain, in a sense, pot gardening came into its own in the gardens of Spain. Under the Moors, life in Spain was Oriental. The gardens, with their fountains and ornamental flower pots, were open living-rooms. Similar outdoor living areas developed in Portugal, which was also occupied by the Moors.
From the time of the Renaissance, when the Italian style of gardening was adopted in northern Europe, potted plants and decorative urns were important. When Versailles set the fashion for the rest of Europe, its fabulous gardens, with their tubbed orange trees and elegant urns, were also copied.
Through Germany and Holland
In Germany, there was a strong trend toward pot gardening. According to a sketch of the seventeenth-century garden of Christopher Peller in Nurenberg, urns and pots were lavishly scattered about. Around the beds, “there are lower stone borders with ornamental pots set on them: these contain plants of many kinds, with orange-trees and other costly foreign plants that have to pass the winter in a hothouse.”
In the Orient
Pot plants were always much used in the East, especially in Chinese gardens, where the emphasis is on pines, foliage