Her latest topic is container gardening, and the beloved author — really, most people who meet this lady fall immediately in love with her — offered a sneak peek at what her next book, The Container Garden: A moveable feast, will offer readers.

Mrs Eddison was at C.H. Booth Library on April 22 with a new program. She lectures frequently, and honored one of Newtown’s garden clubs with a preview of the program she has most recently put together. Her newest lecture, like her forthcoming book, concerns container gardening.

“Fun! That’s what container gardening should always be,” Mrs Eddison told those who attended her lecture at Booth Library. Dozens of people — members of The Garden Club of Newtown and many nonmembers — filled the available chairs in the Knoepke Meeting Room for the one-hour program that opened with a 30-minute slide lecture and then concluded with another 30 minutes of questions and answers. Her 80 slides offered closeups of plants and full views of the garden at different times of the year.

Mrs Eddison has turned a terrace on the north side of her Newtown home into a container garden that changes hue and design every year. In different years the 33-foot-long by 12-foot-wide space has featured hues of yellows, greens and violets. This year the garden is a “brilliant, shattering blue… it’s not a peaceful blue,” she said with a laugh.

“These are proper gardens, and they’re on a scale that you can cope with even if you have deer problems,” she said. “I look at mine as a different garden every year.”

Container gardens, Mrs Eddison said, need certain features. Each one should have bone structure and form, backbone plants, cones, globes, a sense of stability, and an illusion of permanence.

The difference between container gardening and decorating a space with pots, she explained, is that any garden is meant to be experienced.

“You don’t just look at it,” she said. “You’re there. You are amongst it.”

A former set designer, Mrs Eddison said she enjoys container gardening because she relates this work to theater work. As with set pieces, bits of walls and doorways that have their locations, dimensions, and even colors constantly changed, container gardens shift every year. Mrs Eddison has an archway that tends to feature different types of vines annually, a fountain that has been moved from time to time, and even different plants are used to frame a sliding door that leads from the Eddisons’ terrace to their kitchen.

“I really make a lot of work for myself sometimes, but it’s fun,” she laughed.

Like their in-ground counterparts, container gardens can be counted on to do different things in different months. In May, most plants arrive at the Eddison home. The pots are beginning to fill up by June, and in July the garden is filling in. The garden can then be enjoyed from August through October, and by November even a few hardy plants may still be hanging on.

Plan to have a good drainage system, Mrs Eddison urged.

“Drainage is important, critical, one of the most important things,” she advised. “Most people kill more plants with poor drainage than anything else.”

Two more things to keep in mind when container gardening: Plants in big pots are easier to care for than those in smaller pots. And hanging pots are vulnerable because they are exposed from all sides. This makes is difficult to know whether its soil is completely soaked or the water is just rolling off the foliage.

All of these points and more will be fleshed out fully in The Container Garden: a moveable feast. Mrs Eddison’s next book will again couple her writing with photographs by Steve Silk, who did the sumptuous views for Mrs Eddison’s most recent release, November 2002’s The Gardener’s Palette. The book will break down container gardens that have been created on terraces and patios as well as one that is on a rooftop in The Bowery and only receives 90 minutes of full sunlight each day.