Plastic pots might have conquered the industry — but look after terracotta pots and they'll last for lifetimes. Literally.
There are certain objects in the garden that I find ineffably appealing: an old watering can (even a leaky one is so much more friendly and biddable than a kinking hosepipe), a sundial and, most especially, clay flowerpots. Perhaps I owe this deep fondness to my childhood bedtime reading and Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. I can still see in my mind’s eye the illustration of Mr McGregor’s boot in pursuit of Peter kicking over that potted pelargonium. Thanks to Miss Potter’s talents with a paintbrush, the pot itself is an object of bucolic beauty.
Terracotta itself offers us a connection with the earth: a kind of reliability and solidity. Yes, a clay flowerpot shatters when dropped, but then its usefulness is translated into crocks that can help prevent the single drainage hole in the base of others from becoming blocked. No plastic pot can ever engender such endearment.
Until the 1960s, clay flowerpots were everyday objects. My early days of apprenticeship in the nursery involved the winter job of scrubbing them clean over a tank of freezing-cold water, with a scrubbing brush whose bristles were gradually shed until they floated on the water like fallen pine needles. Although sorely tested, my fondness for the pots was not eradicated. Plastic pots were lighter, easier to clean, but they lacked weight to contribute to stability. They needed no crocking, having multiple drainage holes, and the compost was reputed to dry out more slowly than that in clay pots, although being a slave to the watering can in those days I cannot say I noticed much difference.
Terracotta has been used for making flowerpots since about 500BC and, until the 19th century in the UK, it was always a cottage industry — fathers handing on their skills to sons until the 1850s when Richard Sankey of Bulwell, near Nottingham, opened his factory to enable mass production. Even then, the pots were hand thrown — the clay dug locally, together with coal to fire the kilns.
Hand throwing stopped in 1939 and the pots were then moulded until, in the 1970s, production stopped altogether and the firm turned its attention to plastic.
“You can still find pre-1940 moulded-clay flowerpots on online auction sites, in antique shops and from those custodians of our gardening heritage who specialise in old gardening tools, furniture and ephemera”
Thank goodness we can still enjoy the craftsmanship of Jim Keeling and his potters at the Whichford Pottery in Shipston on Stour, Warwickshire, but mercifully millions of those early pots have survived — most of the larger ones still bearing the stamped name of Sankey about their rim. I use small plastic pots only for cuttings in my garden and greenhouse. When a cutting grows roots, it has earned its terracotta pot.
I have a small lean-to at the back of a shed, which is designated as a pot store. Within its confines, you will find pots of all sizes — from 2in to 20in — and the most prized are those that were hand-thrown — easily identifiable from the rounded rather than the moulded rim. The most useful sizes range between 4in and 10in and I marvel at the fact that a skilled potter (as opposed to those whose work involved only the digging of the clay and its processing through the pug mill) could throw as many as three 4in pots per minute. The men were on piecework — the more pots they threw the larger their wage packet.
During my apprenticeship, there were still older gardeners who referred to the pots not by their rim diameter, 3in, 4in, 5in and so on, but as 60s (3½in), 48s (5in), 32s (6in) and 24s (8in) — the number of pots that would fit on a tray in the kiln. Read Shirley Hibberd’s The Amateur’s Greenhouse and Conservatory, published in 1880, if you want a reminder of the way things were done 150 years ago.
You can still find pre-1940 moulded-clay flowerpots on online auction sites, in antique shops and from those custodians of our gardening heritage who specialise in old gardening tools, furniture and ephemera, Louise Allen and Piers Newth at Garden and Wood. You’ll have to pay rather more than the wages of those potters of the early 19th century — an 8in pot (or a 24 if you prefer) will cost you about £25 — but cherish it and it will see you out. My pelargoniums (geraniums in old money) growing in John Innes No. 3 Peat-Free potting compost in 8in flowerpots give me more pleasure than I can tell you. A pleasure that is added to by knowing that the container they are growing in has cultivated plants over many, many years.
‘Chatsworth: The gardens and the people who made them‘ by Alan Titchmarsh is out now (Ebury, £35)
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