Make yours
Tell us the size and this gets drawn to it.
This one is made to order rather than configured on screen: bowl diameter moves from 150 to 260 mm. Send a photo of the plant and the spot it has to live in, with the code PP-HG-190, and a size and a drawing come back the same day. 8 to 11 days from there.
The numbers
- Size
- 190 mm across, 132 mm tall
- Holds
- 1.8 litres of medium
- Made to your size
- bowl diameter, 150 to 260 mm
- What stays as drawn
- Bowl proportion, hole pattern, foot height and saucer clip stay as drawn. Cradle wire gauge steps up above 220 mm. Drop length is cut to order between 250 and 900 mm.
- Lead time
- 8 to 11 days
- Made of
- PETG, printed, bowl and saucer; AISI 304 stainless wire cradle and ring, bought in; Silicone bearing pads at the three cradle contact points, bought in
- Colours
- unpigmented natural, warm white, pale sand, slate grey, moss green (pale sand as standard)
- Water
- Five 8 mm holes on a 70 mm circle, with a 5 mm raised foot ring so the base never seals against the saucer. The saucer clips off entirely, which is how the pot gets flushed.
- Tray
- Tray included
- Where it lives
- Indoors
- Weight
- 515 g empty
These are the figures the piece is drawn to rather than measurements taken off a finished one. Send the pot it has to replace and we will move them.
What it suits
Suits
- Chlorophytum comosum
- Epipremnum
- Rhipsalis and Lepismium
- Ceropegia
- Senecio rowleyanus in the pale colours
- String-type trailers generally
Not for
- Anything upright
- Large ferns, which get heavy and dry out fast up near the ceiling
- Plants needing a deeper root run than 104 mm
Fully planted and freshly watered this assembly is about 2.6 kg. Hang it from a joist or a rated ceiling anchor.
Drawn for Succulents, Pothos and Hoya, and each of those pages says why this shape and not another.
Why it is that shape
The cradle is the whole engineering argument. PETG creeps under sustained tensile load, so a printed lug carrying 2.5 kg of wet pot for two years is a slow failure waiting for a warm day. Passing the load into a wire and putting the plastic in compression removes the problem instead of specifying around it. The 104 mm medium depth is a compromise: deeper would be better against the perched water table, but every extra millimetre of depth is extra hanging mass.
Looking after it
Take it down to water it, at least sometimes. A hanging pot watered in place with the saucer clipped on is a bottom-watered pot with no export path, and the salt collects at the top of the root ball where the fine roots are. Unclip the saucer, flush it over a sink, let it stop dripping, clip the saucer back on.
Pigments fade under sustained sunlight, and a hanging bowl usually hangs in the brightest part of a room. Expect visible change over a couple of years in a south window.
Three parts, and only one of them changes
Most planters are one object. The wall, the floor, the drainage and the look are all the same piece of material, so changing anything about the outside means redrawing the inside too, including the parts that decide whether a plant lives.
Ours come apart into three. The liner is the pot the plant is actually in. The seat ring holds it. The shell is the decorative part, and it is the only one that changes between designs.
That split is not a manufacturing convenience. It is why we can draw a new shell on a Tuesday and have it sit on a liner that has already been through a hundred plants.
The liner, which is the part that keeps a plant alive
The liner holds the medium, the roots and the water. Its floor, its drainage, the draft on its wall and the fill line inside it are the same whatever the outside is doing. Once a liner is right at a given size, it stops changing.
The practical effect for somebody who owns one: you can buy a different shell next year and keep the liner the plant has already rooted into. Redecorating stops being a repotting job.
It also means the numbers on a size sheet are real. The growing chamber on every product here is measured to the fill line rather than to the rim, which is why it never agrees with the outer dimensions and why it is the number worth reading.
The seat ring, which is the whole trick
Between the liner and the shell there is a ring. Its inside is bored to the liner. Its outside is drawn to the shell. It is an adaptor, and it is the smallest, fastest part in the whole assembly.
A new shell costs a new ring and not a new liner. That single sentence is the concept.
It is why a made-to-order range can carry a lot of designs without becoming unreliable. The risky, fussy, horticulturally load-bearing part is printed from a drawing that has not moved in months. The part that is new is the part that only has to look good.
Feet, doing two jobs
Inside a self-watering pot, the feet are what hold the liner clear of the reservoir floor. Lift the assembly apart and the whole arrangement is obvious in one look: the shell, the ring it seats on, the liner, and the gap underneath that the feet create. Take them away and the liner sits in the water, the wick stops being a wick, and the bottom of the root ball is simply submerged.
On a plain pot with a hole, the same feet do something less clever and just as useful: they hold the pot a few millimetres above its own tray, so the drainage hole is never standing in what it drained. A pot that drains into a puddle it is sitting in has not drained.
The legs are loose pieces and the holes in the liner's floor are what they go into. Three to five of them, in one even ring, and with no legs fitted they are simply drainage. That is why the liner does both jobs without being two parts.
Getting water back out, which most pots never do
On a plain pot it is an open floor, a foot that lifts it clear, and a tray that comes off to be emptied. That is the whole specification and it is not a hard one, which makes it strange how many pots are sold without it.
On a self-watering pot it is a plugged drain at the lowest point of the reservoir and a liner that lifts out as one piece. Once a season the plug comes out, the whole vessel goes under a tap, and the salts leave the building. A reservoir you can only fill is a reservoir you are slowly poisoning.
On an orchid pot it is most of the wall. Cattleya and its relatives are potted in coarse bark that has to dry all the way through between waterings, so the opening is not a hole in the bottom, it is a third of the side.
The rest of the Hanging and wall pots
The whole range Pots by design Find it by plant How these are built