People grow plants in all sorts of containers: fancy stone urns, rustic baskets, redundant toilet bowls, cast-off boots. But, to my mind, you can't beat the plain old terracotta flowerpot, consistently in use since at least 2500 BC, when the ancient Egyptians filled them with decorative plants to jizz up their formal pleasure gardens.
They used potted plants to emphasise the geometry of the garden: to create accents at the corners of pools or to make a dotted line along walls and paths, exactly as you see in Italianate gardens nowadays. In fact, the classic Roman garden is a direct descendant of the ancient Egyptian one - having travelled to Italy via the Near East and Greece.
I learned these interesting snippets of information in the recently-published paperback edition of The New Terracotta Gardener, a clever book about flowerpots, their history, manufacture and uses. Written by Jim Keeling of Whichford Pottery in Warwickshire, it leads the reader right from the birth of the first pots through to the present day in Britain - with stopovers in Egypt, Crete, Greece and Italy along the way. Fifteen renowned pot gardeners share their expertise with the author, while stimulating photographs of their displays are taken by Andrew Lawson. And - best of all - the planting plans for every single container are detailed at the end of the book.
There is also plenty of advice on the mechanics of growing things in pots, and for those gardeners who want to achieve an instant patina of age on brand-new terracotta a few tricks are offered. Pots can be lightened with a wash of lime, or greened up with a spray of fertiliser, comfrey leaf or manure solution. Or you could try leaving the pots under dripping trees or in long grass, or brushing them with sour milk or yogurt.
This book doesn't suggest, however, the tip given to an Enniscorthy potter by one of his customers - "a very posh lady" - for weathering pots: " Get the gentlemen to pee on them," she advised. "It works just as well."
Enniscorthy, an area rich in marl - the clay for terracotta - has a history of pot-throwing that goes back over 300 years. There are still three potteries, all within a couple of miles of each other, just west of the town. The oldest is Carley's Bridge, which was set up in 1654 by a pair of brothers who came from Cornwall. It's now run by Tony Sutton and his family who produce simple, traditional flowerpots with few frills other than scalloping and decorative lugs. The smallest, costing about £3.50, has a six-inch diameter, while the largest is a 14-inch one, at £35.
They are all made from the local clay - "we still have thousands of tons of it out there" - and are fired at 990 degrees Centigrade. Any hotter and the pots distort: "it flows like lava if you go higher"; any cooler and they are likely to split or chip in cold weather when the moisture inside the porous fabric freezes.
Not far away, at Kiltrea Bridge Pottery Michael Roche loves to throw mammoth pots, over two feet wide, and embellished with swags and medallions and harvest sheaves. The truly big pots, which will set you back £150 to £200, are available only from the pottery shop. Some garden centres stock the more manageable pieces like the medium-sized, very elegant, Elizabethan-style pot with a lattice pattern, which sells at £42.25.
Compare this price with that of a similar imported pot, as sold in every garden centre and hardware shop, and there is no competition: the imported pot wins hands down, at perhaps a third of the price. But, before you take the inexpensive, imported pot, ask yourself - and the retailer - these questions: Is the workmanship as fine? Is the clay fired as hard? And most importantly, was it manufactured by workers in acceptable conditions?
At one time I bought quantities of plain, press-moulded terracotta flowerpots which my local supermarket was selling at half-nothing. I thought I was onto a great thing, as I happily shelled out only a couple of quid for each pot. Now, some years later, half of the pots have bit the dust (but they make admirable drainage shards in the bottom of other pots), while the other half are almost all cracked or chipped.
The third of the Enniscorthy potters is Paddy Murphy of Hillview Potteries, which has "a family tradition of pot-making behind me for the last 400 years". The advent of imported pots on the Irish market has hit his one-man business badly: "Now I only go out to the wheel for half a day now and again," he says. "I used to glory in making pots. And it was lovely, when the day would be over, to stand and look at what pots you've turned out and say, well, they're made to my satisfaction now."
His patio planters, strawberry pots and wall pots, which cost between £5 and £20, are simple, chunky and really hard-fired: "You could hear mine ringing down the street", whereas from the imported competition "all you'd hear is a dead, dull, soggy, chocolatey sound".
The New Terracotta Gardener by Jim Keeling, published by Headline, 176 pp, £12.99 in UK.
Carley's Bridge Potteries, Carley's Bridge, Co. Wexford. Tel: 054-33512, fax: 054-34360. Monday Friday, 8.30 5.30. Special opening during Wexford Opera Festival weekends, Saturday and Sunday, 10.30 4.30.
Kiltrea Bridge Pottery, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford. Tel: 054-35107, fax: 054-34690. Monday Saturday, 9.30 5.30. Special exhibition of large pots from October 16th November 2nd.
Paddy Murphy, Hillview Potteries, Carley's Bridge, Co Wexford. Tel: 054-35443. Open seven days a week, most of the day.