Looking For Full Sun Container Plants? Try These Gorgeous Plant Combos And Themes

When it comes to full sun container plants, you have a lot of options. Most ornamental plants thrive in full sun conditions – as long as you keep an eye on watering during particularly hot spells. This great variety of choices means you can have fun and be creative with your container garden.

Why grow just one plant per pot when you can come up with thrilling combinations? Full sun container gardening is a great opportunity to play with color, texture, scale and shape. Here are some ideas for full sun plants for containers that enable you to create miniature theme gardens.

These full sun planting combination ideas will help liven up your yards, patios and balconies with vibrant container displays. Pick a theme, or mix and match the ideas you like best to make the most of your favorite plants for container gardening – and enjoy!

1. Classic Container Planting

Including a thriller, a filler, and a spiller is a classic approach to creating a container combination. When combining full sun plants for pots, it’s an enduring container design that rarely misses. The thriller is a tall plant for the center, the filler fills in the space around it, and the spiller trails over the sides. In combination, the overall effect is one of balance, variety and visual interest.

For full sun thrillers, try container-friendly compact dahlia varieties, cannas or dwarf salvia varieties. Good filler options for drought-tolerant containers for full sun include petunias, lantana and geraniums. For your attractive spiller, try growing sweet alyssum, creeping Jenny or lobelia.

2. Low-Maintenance Containers

When it comes to low maintenance outdoor potted plants, full sun options easily accommodate your goals. Many full sun plants for pots are easy to grow, but this combination is reassuringly straightforward.

Purple fountain grass provides a showstopper for little effort. It adds height and tolerates heat well. Surround this tall grass with red salvia, which offers spikes of color and is one of the best ways to attract butterflies and bring more hummingbirds to your yard. Tuck sweet alyssum into the spaces in between for low, mounding clumps of tiny flowers in white, pink or purple.

3. Color Drenching Plants

Most of us grow plants for color – but have you thought about how you can use color to create a certain mood with your sun-based containers? When choosing full sun flowers for pots, color drenching is a monochromatic approach to building a container garden. It’s more common to mix complementary or contrasting colors, so this style is truly unique.

Whether you’re looking to create a cut flower container garden, an urban oasis or a modern minimalist look, this style can work well. Indeed, you can shop for some striking sun-loving blue and purple plants in the Gardening Know How Shop. But here are some of the best combinations for full sun plants by color drenching:

• Red: geraniums, pentas, verbena, dahlias, salvia, cockscomb.
• Orange: gerber daisies, zinnias, tithonia, marigolds, cosmos.
• Yellow: pansies, marigolds, petunias, calibrachoa, canna, gerber daisies.
• Pink: geraniums, cosmos, snapdragon, gomphrena, sweet pea, petunia.
• Purple/Blue: sweet alyssum, forget me not, cornflower, floss flower, petunia, delphinium.
• White: petunias, sweet alyssum, vinca, pentas, gerber daisies, mandevilla, lobelia.

4. Foliage Container Garden

You may primarily be focused on sourcing full sun flowers for pots. While this is an understandable impulse, the best plants for pots in full sun are not limited to flowers. You can create a combination of full sun plants with striking foliage for something different. Joseph’s coat, for instance, comes in several varieties with leaves in a range of colors from solid purple to green with splashes of pink, red or orange.

Tricolor sage, a striking sage variety, is a pretty herb with purple stems and variegated leaves. It works well whether you are focusing exclusively on a herb garden planter or toying with a mix of edibles and ornamentals.

Artemesia comes in shades of silvery green leaves with a fern-like texture. True ferns prefer shade, so this is a good alternative. Alongside this, papyrus is increasingly popular in container gardens. It has a unique look with tall stems topped by tufts of fine leaves that resemble grass.

5. Cottage Garden in a Pot

If you’ve always admired the sprawling, natural feel of a cottage garden but don’t have the space, create one in a container. Characteristics of cottage garden ideas include an informal look, a lack of clean edges or defined borders, overflowing plants, and a mix of colors, sizes and textures that looks more natural than planned.

Some classic cottage garden plants that you can grow in containers in full sun include lavender, salvia, poppies, sweet alyssum, variegated thyme varieties, foxglove, sweet pea, pansies, phlox and penstemon.

6. Native Container Garden

For a more sustainable approach to container gardening, try using native plant species. As a bonus, you’ll see more native wildlife, including pollinators and birds. For native plants, you’ll need to stick with perennials. Most annuals are non-native, tropical species that won’t survive winter.

Native wildflowers and grasses are great options for full sun container gardens. Your choices will vary depending on where you live and garden, but some examples include compact coneflower varieties, black-eyed Susan, cardinal flower, regionally suitable milkweed varieties, aster, little bluestem, blue grama and deer grass.

Check out the sustainability section of the Gardening Know How Shop for more eco-conscious plants and planting kit.

This article features products available from third party vendors on the Gardening Know How Shop. Keep in mind that our plant inventory is limited - so if you’re thinking of purchasing, don’t wait!