Top tips for tabletop gardening: space-starved Londoners can grow an indoor garden using biscuit tins and old drawers

Tabletop gardening is the way forward for townies with little space. You get all the satisfaction of creating a planted landscape, but on a smaller scale. This kind of gardening is all about the detail both in container and its contents, because the finished result will be admired up close.

London gardener and stylist Emma Hardy has all the moves. “Broaden your buying to perennials as well as annuals and you have a far wider choice of flowers and foliage that will last longer than a season,” says Hardy, who has dreamed up 35 projects for small spaces into a book, Tiny Tabletop Gardens.

“Look beyond the usual terracotta pots for a container that’s a good colour or shape and that you can knock holes into the base, such as galvanised tubs, old biscuit tins, wine crates and wire baskets. I find great stuff at car boot sales and markets like Spitalfields and Kempton Park.”

One such find, an old metal filing drawer, is the basis for a centrepiece of black, purple and white pansies, petunias and violas, topped with moss, while a faded wooden box becomes a treasure chest filled with gold, courtesy of apricot calibrachoa, orange Iceland poppies and the airy flowers of Geum Totally Tangerine.

At this time of year, a waist-high planter that spells spring in high style can be made from an old wooden stool topped with a roomy window box, both painted white and planted with a mix of alpine clematis, fritillaries, pasqueflower and dark Queen of Night tulips.

“If you only have room for a window box, then make it a fabulous one,” says Hardy, who suggests pushing aside the predictable bedding and instead creating a longer-lasting, foliage-rich display of heuchera, heucheralla and tiarella, all of which have the prettiest feathery flowers. Two smoky-shaded hostas are shoehorned in too, and, in a window box on a ledge, are more likely to remain free of slug and snail damage.

You could even have a rose garden, simulating the effect of a profusion of roses by setting a tub on an upturned plastic flowerpot within a larger tub, creating two levels so that the six miniature rosebushes form a pyramid of flowers, finished with trails of ivy.

“If you love the look of cottage gardens, don’t let lack of space stop you from planting one of your own,” says Hardy, who takes an old galvanised metal washing tub and plants it with two rose-pink lupins, an ox-eye daisy, persicaria and a Clotted Cream salvia to make an artless, country-style composition.

Compact containers holding edible plants can be lifted from patio to dining table for guests to help themselves. Hardy displays strawberries, banked up with thyme and violas, in several metal troughs — you could use rectangular loaf tins — ranged down the table centre. Moss-lined wire baskets with handles hold pick-your-own salad leaves and cherry tomatoes, while a fabulous tapering tower of super-trendy microgreens is made from four metal cake tins of different sizes, each layer holding compost and different sprouting seeds.

You could make a centrepiece that is above the table by filling cake tins with a bright gazania or zinnia, backed up with ferns and trailing calibrachoa. Make holes in the tins so they can be hung closely together, at different heights with three lengths of galvanised wire.

In this case, bedding plants such as calibrachoa, alyssyum and bacopa hit the spot, because the plants’ small root systems are happy to be crammed into confined spaces, notably a wire wreath covered with sheet moss. If your fingers aren’t dexterous enough to push the roots of the plants into the moss all around the ring, you could cheat by using a shallow hanging basket.

Reader offer: Tiny Tabletop Gardens is published by CICO Books at £14.99 but Homes & Property readers can buy it for £10.99 including P&P by calling 01256 302699 and quoting code KF6.