Are you having family and friends over this weekend for a party and your yard isn&8217;t quite as presentable as you&8217;d like?

Well, fret no more. Container combinations are a quick, easy and beautiful solution to your worries.

They will provide the color and texture to perk up your landscape for fall festivities. After our extremely hot, dry summer, most everyone could use a few new pots of floral charm gracing their front entrance.

Autumn is a great time for container gardening because the shorter days and cooler temperatures equal less maintenance &8212; a particularly nice change from summer when it seemed liked containers needed water every other hour &8212; especially in regards to moisture.

Combinations are practically limitless. Alyssum, chrysanthemums, dianthus, dusty miller, pansies, petunias, snapdragons, and violas are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to flowering choices available.

Many herbs thrive during fall and winter including bay, cilantro, dill, lavender, parsley, rosemary, sage and thyme, to name a few.

Don&8217;t be afraid to combine herbs with cool-season annuals.

Pansies and parsley make a lovely combination. The leaves of fresh parsley are very flavorful and the pansy flowers are edible as well. Of course, your combinations need not be as sensible, they only need to look attractive to you.

Fall flowering perennials such as the many different salvias and ornamental grasses can take center stage in a large container with smaller pots of color surrounding them, making a huge visual impact.

Another option is to plant a small shrub or tree in the center of a big flowerpot.

At the base, add a mixture of cool-season color and evergreen ivy that will spill over the edges for a classic look, as well as natural mulch. Even sowing ryegrass seed at the base of a shrub or tree that trained into a standard makes a striking appearance. Your imagination is the only limit.

If you are in a real hurry, local nurseries usually have unique and captivating combinations ready for purchase at a reasonable price. If they are growing in a plastic nursery pot that really isn&8217;t your style, simply transplant them by lifting the entire root mass and placing it gently into your own special container.

You can even leave the plants in the plastic pot, setting it into an empty urn, bucket or ceramic pot.

Just make sure to lift the nursery pots out when you water if there is no drainage in your existing decorative pot. Roots sitting in water will be deprived of oxygen and your pretty plants will soon die.

Even more convenient, most nurseries offer colorful combinations that are already in decorative containers so all you&8217;ve to do is take them home and place them at your front entrance. This is particularly nice when you don&8217;t have much time and truly need instant gratification.

Celebrate autumn with striking plant combinations that will bring joy to your life and others&8217;!

Traci Maier

writes a weekly column about gardening in the Miss-Lou. She can be reached by e-mail at

ratmaier@bellsouth.net

.