Mother’s Day is quickly approaching, and it may feel different this year with social distancing and shelter in home orders. One option to help with the holiday is creating a container garden or selecting potted plants and flowers for your Mom to plant. My Mother and I built container gardens together last year and her beautiful hibiscus has bloomed nearly year round, keeping her smiling longer than traditional Mother’s Day gifts.
This year, you can take advantage of Ace Hardware’s curbside service to limit interaction if you are concerned about the spread of Coronavirus. You can see more about their contact less shopping options by clicking here.
We talked with Linda Hertz, the garden shop manager at the Hagan Ace Hardware in Orange Park about picking the perfect plant for your Mom for Mother’s Day.
“Mother’s Day is coming, it’s a very important holiday, and we want to be careful about what we choose, because whatever we choose, we want our Mother to love it, but we also want it to last,” explained Linda.
She said the first thing you need to decide is where the flowers will be -inside, outside in the sun, or outside in the shade?
“When making your choices for your Mom, it depends on whether she’s an outdoor gardener or an indoor gardener, and it could be both. um, make sure you make the right selection as to whats going to be easiest for her, and long lasting, and reminder her every day about Mother’s Day and that you cared enough to choose a good flower for her.”
Linda recommends orchids, ferns, begonias, African violets, and some simple ivy as excellent indoor plant options.
For out door plants that thrive with plenty of sunshine, Linda shared these with us, “If your Mom is an avid gardener these are all full sun or half day sun flowers that you can present her with. They can be potted or put together, you see we can put complemented flowers together in the same pot, we have vines, we have traditional roses, we also have the antique roses, called garden roses, which are so easy to care for, and then we have all kind of beautiful hummingbird or butterfly flowers that will work great.”
The Hagan Ace Hardware in Orange Park’s Garden shop also has hard-to-find antique roses.
For the Mom who has the shady garden, Linda recommends bromeliads, ferns, gardenia, main hair ferns, and one of her favorites, a new plant that came out about three years ago, called a top hat begonia, She says its for women who can’t make up their mind, because there are usually 2 or 3 colors of blooms in each pot.
All the recommended flowers and plants will pot up nicely for presentation, or just wrap them and bring them home and let Mom put them where she wants.
If you do enjoy making some container gardens for you Mother- we want to see them! Upload a photo to our GreenspACE of the week competition, You might end up winning a $100 giftcard to ACE Hardware.