The best spring pots to brighten up your garden

As the season advances to a close and now the majority of spring-blooming bulbs have dropped their petals, there can be a lull before those summer plants best suited to container culture are ready to take over. The gap can be bridged quite admirably, though, by looking around for handsome foliage plants including ferns, succulents and evergreen herbs. In garden centres you’ll also find an increasing range of flowering perennials and shrubs, from diminutive saxifrages to high-rise dicentras.
 Here are seven very distinct planting schemes that decant the essence of late spring into a container but will continue even as spring dissolves into summer.