Danish gardener, designer and television personality Claus Dalby has been called “the Scandinavian Martha Stewart.” Speaking from across the pond, he joins me on the podcast this week to discuss two of his specialties: cottage gardens and container gardens.
Claus Dalby lives in a 1908 home in Risskov, Denmark, where he has a garden that has been featured in many television programs. He has written about 30 books on flowers and gardens in Danish, and in 2022 he published his first book in English, “Containers in the Garden.” He followed that up a year later with “The Cottage Garden.” Next year, “Container Kitchen Gardens” will be released in English.
Claus Dalby is a Danish gardener, designer and television personality, with more than 30 books, two of which have been translated to English with a third coming out in English next year.
Photo Courtesy of Claus Dalby
Claus has been gardening since 1996, when a large lawn covered his one-acre property. The grass is now long gone and replaced by 15 hedged rooms. He is also passionate about growing in pots and designing container gardens. He now has a couple of thousand containers.
Claus creates moods with flowers and bouquets to instill a sense of “hygge” — the Danish word for coziness. He is mainly interested in design (he designs hand-blown glass vases in addition to garden design) but also has his hands in the dirt himself and propagates plants from seeds and cuttings.
Claus’s website and YouTube channel are beautiful, and the photos of his garden are breathtaking. In fact, I don’t know if I have ever seen a more beautiful website. Check them out, and you will be impressed — and learn something, too.
Claus has visited the United States and toured New England, meeting such renowned gardeners as Bunny Williams and Martha Stewart along the way. He was struck by how beautiful and European-influenced New England gardens are.
Claus Dalby’s garden is divided by hedged into “rooms.”
Photo Courtesy of Claus Dalby
Designing Colorful Borders and Containers
Claus says his secret has always been to find people who are better than him. When he converted his lawn to a garden, he wanted a garden with zero grass. He did some research and hired a landscape designer to create garden rooms, each with its own colors and mood.
He pays close attention to foliage around borders and favors lime-green foliage in particular. Limey foliage brightens things up, especially in spring, he says. He likes buddleias and hydrangeas in borders among other shrubs. He also likes working with variegated foliage.
“Sometimes it can be a little bit difficult if you overdo it,” he says. “I always say that the foliage needs to be an echo of the colors in the borders.”
He also really likes to surprise people, for example putting orange, purple and limey foliage together. He also plays with color combinations in his container gardens.
“It’s much easier with the pots because you can just move them around and you can make so many nice things,” he says. “And it’s much easier than a border because to make a border, it’s a lifelong journey.”
Container gardens present opportunities to arrange and rearrange plants to play with various colors and textures.
Photo Courtesy of Claus Dalby
Claus’s Plant Picks
One of Claus’s favorite tulips to grow is “Spring Green.” It’s fairly easy to grow, and in the right conditions, it will come back year after year, he says. It starts white then gains a hint of green before changing to cream and green. “You can have it in all places. It fits with all colors,” he says.
He also believes in companion planting to avoid bare ground around roses and to accompany dahlias before they bloom in late summer. He calls dahlias the “tulips of autumn” because they offer the same colors to work with.
He grows his dahlias in pots, starting them in a greenhouse before moving them outdoors. He also uses supports on his dahlias to keep them standing. His favorites are pom-pom and ball dahlias.
He has 300 or 400 fairly big pots of dahlias, but the tubers can dry out or, conversely, rot in damp soil. So he’ll dig the tubers out of the pots in time and move them into the ground.
The Importance of Shapes and Repetition
From the Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf — the designer of the High Line in Manhattan and a leading figure in the New Perennialist movement — Claus learned much about shapes. “When you start with gardening, it’s very much about flowers and colors, and maybe you forget the shapes,” Claus says.
Reading Oudolf’s books taught Claus about the need to have spikes, small flowers, big flowers — an assortment. He also learned the importance of repetition, using the same plant in large swaths and multiple times.
Repetition is valuable in border design as well as in container gardens.
“When you see my containers, I always have some of the same plants in different spaces,” he points out. “Because if you, for example, have 30 pots and you have 30 different plants, I think it’s very, very difficult to combine them.”
But if you have 30 pots and 10 different plants, with three pots of each, it’s much easier to make a coherent composition, he explains.
The shape of flowers is as important as color when designing a garden. Photo Courtesy of Claus Dalby
Cottage Gardening with Umbellifers
Cottage gardening is not the easiest way to garden. “It looks so easy, and therefore it’s difficult,” Claus says.
He likes to use umbellifers, known as the celery, carrot or parsley family. Umbellifers are important pollinator-attracting plants with a lacy, light element to them. Though there are many edibles in the family, there are also many very attractive ornamental plants as well.
“There are so many beautiful umbellifers you can use in the garden, and they give so much,” Claus says. He plants white-flowered umbellifers around roses and dahlias.
“I’m always searching for great umbellifers,” he says. One he recommends that is difficult to get because it must be sown with fresh seeds is Pimpinella major ‘Rosea,’ a soft pink umbellifer.
“It’s a long lasting perennial. It comes back year after year after year,” Claus says.
Sow the fresh seeds in October, and they will sprout in March, will be transplantable by May and will flower the next year.
Claus says you can go to a nursery and buy a lot of beautiful plants, but that is very expensive. He also enjoys learning from seeds — and he doesn’t get that experience when he buys plants.
Another view of Claus Dalby’s garden. Photo Courtesy of Claus Dalby
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Claus Dalby on cottage gardens and container gardens. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Do you have a cottage garden or container garden? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 041: Small Space Garden Design
Episode 329: Cultivating a Personal Garden Style with Rochelle Greayer
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joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
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Claus Dalby on Instagram | @clausdalby
“Containers in the Garden” by Claus Dalby
“The Cottage Garden” by Claus Dalby
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Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you make a purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Proven Winners ColorChoice, and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
