Make yours
Open this pot in the editor and change it.
Move the diameter, the height, the wall, the flutes, the liner and the feet, and what comes out is a file and a code you send us. The link carries PP-SW-180 with it, so the drawing you started from comes back with the order. 7 to 10 days from the moment a size is agreed.
Change this pot Or ask a person instead See the parts inside
The numbers
- Size
- 180 mm across, 205 mm tall
- Made to your size
- outer diameter, 150 to 260 mm
- What stays as drawn
- Surface design is retained; the liner and lid are one part with a 45 mm stand-off.
- Lead time
- 7 to 10 days
- Made of
- PETG, printed shell, fused liner and lid, and drainage feet
- Colours
- unpigmented natural, warm white, pale sand, slate grey (unpigmented natural as standard)
- Water
- Round liner drainage holes and taller drainage feet above the reservoir. Lift out the liner and lid together to empty and rinse the outer pot.
- Tray
- No tray
- Where it lives
- Indoors
- Weight
- 430 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
- Epipremnum
- Philodendron hederaceum
- Spathiphyllum
- Chlorophytum
- Peperomia
- Ferns that resent drying
Not for
- Succulents and cacti
- Sansevieria
- Zamioculcas
- Hoya
- Anything grown in a bark-only epiphyte mix, which will not wick
A wick only works if the medium wicks. A 40 to 50 percent air mix of the kind aroid keepers use will sit dry above a full reservoir.
Drawn for Aroids, Alocasia and Pothos, and each of those pages says why this shape and not another.
Why it is that shape
The fused liner and lid lift out together; the 45 mm liner stand-off creates a deeper reservoir than the 25 mm designer build.
Looking after it
Topping a reservoir up is not maintaining it. Salts arrive with every fill and leave with none, and in a bottom-fed pot they collect towards the top of the root ball where most of the fine roots are. Empty and replace the reservoir rather than refilling it, and flush the basket from above when you see crust on the medium surface or the rim, or when leaf tips brown without another explanation. Do not use a calendar; the rate depends on your water and your feed and varies between two households by more than an order of magnitude.
Unpigmented PETG is a faintly green-grey translucent, not clear. Pigments fade under sustained sunlight and this pot is not sold as colourfast.
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 water under the floor
On a self-watering pot there is a void under the liner, and it holds the water. The plant draws from it through a wick, so the medium stays evenly damp instead of swinging between drenched and bone dry. For a pothos, a peace lily or a fern that sulks the moment it dries, that swing is the thing that was hurting it.
It is also the feature that is wrong for more plants than it is right for. A cactus, a succulent, a Hoya or a Cattleya wants the opposite: wet for an hour, then air. Every plant guide on this site says which of the two you have, plainly, at the top of the page.
And a reservoir that can only be topped up is a trap. Salt arrives with every fill and leaves with none, collecting towards the top of the root ball where the fine roots are. That is why ours has a plug in the bottom of it.
Flush Vessel 180 Pothos, where a reservoir helps Cacti, where it does not
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.
The mesh that holds the substrate up
The floor of the liner is open. It has to be, or water and air cannot move through the root ball, but an open floor over a tank of water is also a way to lose half your mix into the reservoir on the first watering.
So the floor is a mesh, sized to hold a normal potting mix while letting the wick and the air through. The grade matters: fine enough for compost, open enough that it does not blind over with fines and turn into a sealed plate in the second year.
The same pot in a different shell
The shell is the only part that changes between designs, so this liner sits just as happily inside flutes and ribs, plates standing off the wall, contour bands, quilting, a field of domes or a wave pushed through the whole thing — and the outline underneath them moves too. Every one of them opens in the editor at this pot’s own size.
The rest of the Self-watering pots
The whole range Pots by design Find it by plant How these are built